RBA governor Glenn Stevens has again warned that income, consumption and savings will not return to the pattern of the boom years of 1996 to 2006.In his traditional yearly speech to the Anika Foundation in Sydney yesterday, Stevens gave the RBA's most detailed explanation yet for the "cautious consumer" behaviour of the past four years. This consumer caution also "seems to have intensified over the past few months," he said.Consumer caution is driving up savings rates, allowing banks in particular to fund more of their borrowings from local deposits.But that same caution also reduces households' need to borrow. And, by slowing demand for goods and services, it also makes businesses less keen to borrow, and less viable when it comes to lending.Stevens argued that the Australian economy and financial sector had experienced a decade-long stimulus up to 2005 as consumers pushed their consumption up by a yearly average of about three-quarters of a percentage point more than their incomes grew. Savings rates necessarily fell by the same amount.But, from around 2007, even as income growth was rising, per-person consumption essentially stopped growing, pushing up savings rates. He attributed these changes to a fall in the value of households' assets - both financial assets, such as superannuation, and non-financial assets, such as housing."It's no wonder that people are talking about consumer caution," he said, "and no wonder that retailers are finding things very tough indeed."Stevens also noted that the less-consumption, more-savings trend would inevitably end at some point, but said it was not possible to predict when that would happen.Stevens' colleague, RBA assistant governor Malcolm Edey, said in a speech on Monday that "it seems unlikely that we'll be going back to the days of consistent double-digit growth in lending that we saw in the pre-crisis years."