Durable Goods and Valuables Finally, I want to make it clear that private saving as defined here, and therefore private wealth, does not include household purchases of durable goods: furniture, appliances, automobiles, and so on. In this respect I am following international standards for national accounting, under which durable household goods are treated as items of immediate consumption (although the same goods, when purchased by firms, are counted as investments with a high rate of annual depreciation). This is of limited importance for my purposes, however, because durable goods have
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