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And they complain that gold doesn't pay any interest

Section: Daily Dispatches

... It's just up 28 percent in the last year.

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CDs Fall Below 1% First Time Since ’50s

By Tiernan Ray
Barron's
Monday, November 8, 2010

http://blogs.barrons.com/stockstowatchtoday/2010/11/08/cds-fall-below-1-...

Fewer people are taking out loans, and banks are just delighted to offer them less and less for the privilege: Even as consumer debt continues to wind down, banks are showing less inclination to ease terms of loans, and the payoff they’re offering for various consumer deposits just keeps going lower.

Dow Jones Newswires' Katy Burne this afternoon reports that rates on certificates of deposit, considered the "pillow" among U.S. consumer deposit products, fell below 1% for the first time since the 1950s, according to data by Market Rates Insight.

The average CD yield today is 0.98%, the firm notes, having fallen below 1% on average last month. Market rates tracks data back on 20 years, but using Fed Reserve data, they tell Burne the rate is lower than it was in the early '50s. Savings accounts and other products had already fallen below 1% this summer, CDs were the last to go.

This comes as the latest Fed Reserve survey notes consumers continued to pare their debts overall in Q3, with total credit of $11.6 trillion falling almost 1% from Q2, according to the writeup by the Journal's Deborah Lynn Blumberg.

That sounds about consistent with the Fed's survey of loan officers at 57 domestic banks in October showed that fewer banks were increasing their willingness to loan than was the case in previous surveys, and "small net fractions of banks reported having tightened spreads of interest rates on credit cards over their cost of funds and reduced the size of credit lines on existing credit card accounts."

While large banks saw an increase in demand for consumer loans, other banks were saying demand fell.



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