That’s where I have my emergency fund (earning nearly zero interest of course). If OP knows of some other type of account with enough liquidity to use as an emergency fund AND generates significant interest, you have my full attention!
Some banks, like Ally, also offer a "no penalty" CD, which has lower interest rates than a regular CD, but you can pull your money out at any time without paying a penalty, like you would on a regular CD.
Increased fed fund rates and tapering off QE has been having effects. Retail customers generally are unaware of this, so retail banks are still able to not pay any actual interest.
A lot of the weirdness in the market (from Tesla to GE and others) is due to increased returns from 'safe' investments causing easy money for risky ventures to start to dry up. Expect failures as companies built on nearly free money start having to pay up or fold. Some will survive, many won't.
how precarious is it? any thoughts/guesstimates on the percentage that will fail because of higher rates?
As to how many will fail is anyone's guess. Retail has already started to have a reaping (with help from Amazon). If a trade war kicks off price increases for goods from China, that probably won't help a lot of them.
Sub-prime auto market is not doing well either, that should hurt auto manufacturer numbers, but nothing crazy there at the moment.
I think everyone is still trying to guess.
If you can hold off on needing the funds for a year, then US I-Bonds can be purchased from TreasuryDirect. I-bond rates are adjusted semi-annually so they always yield more than inflation and currently at 2.52%. Treasury T-bills can be purchased in 4, 8, 13, 26, and 52-week terms. Current rate for 4-week bills is around 1.89%.
Obviously, this might not work as a single solution if your monthly expenses are much higher than mine, but it could still be a decent supplement.