Word: cds
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Beleaguered financial institutions looking to shore up their funding are battling for your deposit dollars, driving interest rates on bank products abnormally high. At first glance, that's fantastic news for consumers who are finding CDs that yield 4% and money-market accounts that pay 3%. But the competition for money - which will surely intensify as new bank holding companies like Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and American Express amp up efforts to attract deposits - is also squeezing banks' profit margins, further straining an already weak industry and stressing smaller banks, many of which didn't go hog wild making risky...
Taking the lead in pricing up the market are the institutions most battered by the credit crisis and flagging economy. Among the companies offering the highest yields on CDs are GMAC, the financing arm of the carmaker GM; Corus, a Chicago bank that has lost substantial money on construction loans; Wachovia, the Charlotte, N.C., bank whose sale to Wells Fargo was brokered by regulators in October; and the bank affiliate of the insurance company AIG, which the Federal Government started bailing out in September...
...American Express and business financier CIT have all applied to convert into bank holding companies, partly in order to be able to get access to cheap funding through deposits. GE Capital, the finance arm of GE, is planning on doubling its deposit base, which it garners through broker-sold CDs, to $81 billion next year. Goldman Sachs is on track to open an online bank. Morgan Stanley, which already has $36 billion in deposits, is selling billions of dollars' worth of new CDs and looking at other banks it might buy. "It's really changing the landscape," says Timothy Koch...
...least it should. Balanced funds that hold bonds and cash along with stocks are down just 29%, according to mutual-fund tracker Morningstar. And many retirees looking to minimize risk wisely hold a smaller percentage of stocks than the average balanced fund (and also may own insured bank CDs). Which means a more typical experience for them is a 20% loss, says Gregg Fisher, president of Gerstein Fisher, a financial adviser in New York City. That's not fun, but it's nowhere near as bad as the headlines...
SHOPPING Record Shop, Plaza de San Ildefonso, is in a very beautiful old square. You go downstairs to a garage, and there are vinyls, CDs and videos...