The FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee) finished their January meetings this week. They usually meet every six weeks and outside of a sudden change that affects the economy they won’t meet again until March. Of particular interest to savers is the commitment to keep rates low, well into 2014. Their goal is to keep borrowing [Read More…]

I apologize for the image, I just couldn’t help myself when I saw it. Don’t worry, the aliens aren’t coming and you don’t need to flee to the hills. As the title indicates, “Stay the Course!” Panic is never a good thing. It often leads us to making rash decisions that we regret later. The [Read More…]

The Million Dollar question. Where to invest 1 million dollars? Or $100,000 question (that would be a 10% return)? I don’t have $1,000,000 or any investments offering 10%, so what do I have? For starters, some common sense ideas. I’ll follow that with some individual stock ideas (and for the record, I don’t own any [Read More…]

Note: This was originally going to be released before the year end, but another topic (Main Street Bank)took my time away. 2010 is done. I thought I would do a post and give some of my perspective on last year and what could happen in 2011. I don’t have a crystal ball so I could [Read More…]

Image by: by Frits Ahlefeldt Sometimes, enough is enough. We’ve tried talking to you, but you don’t want to listen. We tried talking to your supervisor (the FDIC), but they don’t seem to care. So we are left with very few options. On late December 24th, you sent a notice that you were canceling some [Read More…]

We have added a new Business CD Rate section to our website to focus on our CD service for business and institutional clients. We have been in the CD Placement business for almost twenty years. Our clients include public entities, trust departments, corporations, banks, credit unions, associations, etc. We track CD rates at over 100 [Read More…]

Sometimes I hate being right. I am often asked for a certificate of deposit rate forecast and last week I made a doozy. Unfortunately, it seems to be coming true. I predicted that 1-year CD rates would be heading towards 0.50% and 5-year CDs down to 1.50%. When you remove the top players, we are [Read More…]

On Wednesday, President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. This was touted as the largest set of financial reforms since The Great Depression. Only time will tell if that is true or not. The good news is that tucked into the bill was making the $250,000 FDIC insurance [Read More…]

This is pretty exciting news. A story in MarketWatch mentioned that a House Panel has voted 12 to 7 to make the $250,000 FDIC insurance limit permanent. In addition, it would make it retroactive to January 1, 2008. This would certainly help people who lost funds in the ANB Failure in May of 2008 and [Read More…]

The FDIC has basically established a national rate for CDs. You’ll find it quite difficult to find any bank offering above 1.60% for 1-year CDs. You may be wondering why. Starting January 1, 2010, under capitalized banks have to set rates at or below the Weekly rates that the FDIC publishes. Here is a link. [Read More…]