Which banks' savings accounts are yielding anything close to money-market rates?
This is less than you would get buying short term treasuries, but not terrible.
64 basis points isn't nothing, but I think that qualifies at close - and I didn't go digging, those were just the first two that came to mind.
(Kinda. The other big distinction between a bank and a money-market fund is that the latter don’t indulge the farce of “demand deposits”. Money-market accounts are fixed-term securities, so you’ve agreed to lock up your money until some agreed upon future date, just like with a bond. That might be inconvenient for you, in comparison to a bank account, but it vastly reduces the complexity the fund faces in matching maturities of liabilities and assets to minimize run risk. As a result, together with stricter regulatory controls on their risk-taking, money-market funds fail much less often than banks do. The last time a US money-market fund broke the buck, in 2008, during the last financial crisis, the Treasury stepped in to make investors whole.)
Not really:
0. https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/hp1161
1. https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
“Participating MMFs were required to have an NAV at or above $0.995 on September 19, 2008 (Department of the Treasury 2008f). Architects of the program chose this cutoff to prevent damaging runs while at the same time not curing “losses that had already been sustained (because of credit mistakes) at the few funds that were already in trouble” (Shafran 2020).”
“There were no losses, and the Department of the Treasury did not make any payments through the Guarantee Program, generating a surplus of $1.2 billion in fees.”
(In fact, the SEC ended up suing Reserve Primary’s managers for making misleading statements after breaking the buck that they would restore a $1 NAV, which they did not do. Reserve Primary’s investors had an eventual recovery as of 2011 of 99.06% of par value.)
Of the funds that participated in the Treasury’s guarantee program, none were liquidated likely because the program succeeded in stemming the run on the money-market sector. As I’m sure you know, the whole point of the Treasury’s guarantee was to give money-market investors confidence that their money was safe so that they would not redeem their shares and the funds would not need to liquidate assets for payouts.
It worked, and I think it’s clear that the Treasury’s backstop, by ending the run, prevented fire-sales that likely would have led to the liquidation of further funds in the absence of government intervention. That was the point I was making in my original comment: despite the lack of a formal equivalent of deposit insurance for money-market funds, the government did step in to backstop investor’s money in the sector during the only episode in which there was a need for it.
Edit: Whoops, also noticed that in my original comment above, I twice mis-wrote money-market account. Everything we’ve been discussing relates to money-market funds (more formally, money-market mutual funds), not money-market accounts. The latter term is another name for savings accounts at a bank, which of course are FDIC-insured. (The two are related in that the cash put into both gets invested in short-term, low-risk government and commercial bonds, the markets for which are collectively called “money markets”.)
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/20-banks-that-are-sitting-...