Without saving, you can't have debt - banks need money before they can loan any out.
While this seems to be a common conception, nothing could be further from the truth. Banks create money out of thin air by loaning it out (bank money creation). What they need (or should need) is not deposits from savers but collateral from the debitor to back up the debt claim. Regulation also requires them, for certain kinds of accounts, to keep a certain amount of reserve, but this applies to both, funds acceped (i.e. deposits) or funds created (against a credit contract backet by collateral).
The bank needs money on days where more cash is withdrawn than deposited but of course, this averages out to zero across the whole system (inluding central bank money), so some banks are bound to have surpluses that day which they are usually willing to lend away to other banks in the interbank market (at the LIBOR rate). If not, the bank can still get funds from the central bank (the the FED rate) against collateral.
Deposits from "savers" are nice to have as (1) they create fees, are (2) usually cheaper than interbank loans and (3) depositors don't ask for collateral whereas central banks do; they are, however, not necessary for a bank to run it business (in which case, the bank would be an inverstment bank as opposed to a commercial bank).
saving drives the economy just as much as consuming.
It is true that you need both, the question is: What is the limiting factor? In a regime of full-employment where the economy runs at full capacity (like in the decades after WW2), you are in a supply-side regime and there are enough "good" investment opportunities so that additional savings can be put to use in the real economy to create future wealth. Alas, most industrial countries have left this regime in the 70s and have now entered a demand-side regime of structural unemployment where the economy runs below capacity. In this regime, you don't have a lack of savings but a lack consumption and thus a lack of profitable "real" (i.e. good or service producing) investment opportunities. As a consequence, additional savings don't fuel the real economy but will merely blow up speculative bubbles in asset markes (stocks, real estate, commodities, "financial innovations" etc.) without creating any additional wealth. Worse, the "surplus" savings are permanently withheld from the real economy and lead to additional bankruptcies as there is more "active" debt than "active" money to pay it down and you get a classic deflationary downward spiral.
While this is the sad state of affairs in almost all western countries, in the US it's even worse as you have moved most of your production overseas and thus have even more unemployment and even less investment opportunities than you would otherwise have - and a huge net-debt on top of it.
ignatius
