This may get lost among the inevitabel degenration of conversation into tit-for-tat sniping between 2 or 3 posters, but nonetheless, to park money in a safe place, consider TreasuryDirect.gov — website run by your own Federal Government. You can buy a ladder of Treasury Bills w/ yields higher than 5%. That’s better than Treasury money market mutual funds, which typically have expenses ranging from 0.25% to 0.75%. Minimum investment in a Treasury Bill at TreasuryDirect.gov is $1,000, which is small.
If you’re more deep pocketed, Fidelity Brokerage and, starting 7/1/06, Charles Schwab will allow you to buy Treasury Bills at Auction for free (as in no commission). But the minimum denomination for Treasury Bill is $10,000, which is more than the min of TreasuryDirect. One advantage of going w/ Schwab is that they have 100% guarantee against security breach and unauthorized activities. TreasuryDirect.gov, astoundingly, does not offer that guarantee even though it is run by the Federal Government. So you do run a small risk if someone steal your TreasuryDirect.gov account id and password
If my opinion, if your purpose is to “park money in a safe place”, then there is no safer place than Treasury Bills. T-Bills are safer than your local bank’s FDIC-insured CDs. For one thing, if your local bank goes belly up, you may get your money back eventually, it’s still a hassle w/ heartburn. Besides, there’s a the $100K max insured amount per account w/ FDIC.
As an additional hedge against the US dollar going the way of soiled toilet paper, you may want to diversify w/ foreign exchange. And, what do you know, you can now buy FX via exchange traded funds. Check out currencyshares.com for more detail on these new ETFs. I am partial to the Canaadian loonie (FXC). But there are others such as Euros (FXE) and Swiss Francs (FXF), but my personal opinion is that the Euro is overvalued, and the Swiss Franc is losing its hard currency status. Stay away from the Pound Sterling (FXB), Australian dollar (FXA), and others.
