Interesting theory. A friend of mine that worked on Wall Street during the late 1990’s made the same observation…401K’s had drastically increased the amount of cash into the market since almost all of the contributions are made to mutual funds. I wonder if anyone has done an analysis of this?.
I also remember hearing some people doing the same thing during the last recession of 2002…e.i. withdrawing from their IRA’s to pay bills, etc… According to most financial analysts, people no longer save in the USA because they consider their IRA’s a type of savings account. So it stands to reason that they will take $$ from it in times of need. So the question is, “How much and for how long?”