Röpke Rejects the Over-Saving Argument

This is an over-saving argument and Röpke will have none of it. In the following passage, he rejects the over-saving argument in precisely the form it was later raised by Keynes in the General Theory:

Some ... even go to the length of asserting that there is a permanent tendency for investment to be outrun by savings and therefore a tendency towards a chronic depression which is only interrupted by short-lived fits of concentrated investment. According to these gloomy pessimists -- mostly sanguine inflationists in disguise, if not actually prophets of the end of capitalism -- our economic system is headed for a sort of economic 'entropy' where all economic energy will be paralysed by a suffocating excess of savings ....

Enough has been said on these points to make a refutation of such wild surmises hardly necessary. It all boils down to the question as to whether it is conceivable that savings can ever become so abundant that we do not know what to do with them even at a rate of interest approaching zero. To this question, of course, only one answer is possible. Over-saving as such is an inconceivable thing, belonging to the same species as other economic scares like over-production.

--Steven Kates, Say's Law and the Keynesian Revolution: How Macroeconomic Theory Lost its Way (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2009), 118.