Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors and a likely candidate to succeed Alan Greenspan as the Federal Reserve’s chairman in January, has called the decline in real interest rates over just the last decade a “global savings glut.” It is not that there is “too much” saving around the world today, but that the amount of saving has been high enough that returns, as measured by real interest rates, are a lot lower than they once were.