then work your way down.
The Most Bang for Your Buck!
Unfortunately, Bernanke is following in the swaggering and crooked footsteps of his predecessor, Greenspan. When Greenspan dropped the interest rate to 1% in order to soften the consequences of the Internet bubble, he only managed to create an even bigger bubble. The damage of that move has spread like a cancer throughout our financial markets and has gone way beyond a housing bubble.
By dropping interest rates to 1%, and threatening to drop them even lower, Bernanke is making it almost impossible for the person on the street to make any gains through saving. Greenspan betrayed our older citizens who were counting on reasonable returns on their safe investments (savings, Money Market, and CDs). Their gains were now wiped out by inflation. They were now losing money by being responsible and saving.
This makes it difficult to give advice on where you can get the best return on the dollars you have managed to create from your thrift. You can search the Internet for the highest yielding savings, Money Market, or CD. I doubt if you can find any that will give you a return even close to inflation. The government numbers on inflation are highly deflated and can't be trusted.
How Much Risk Tolerance Do You Have?
When people found they were losing money in their savings accounts, they were pretty much forced to go into the stock market. Perhaps this was part of the plan in the first place. Let's get that money out of savings accounts and get people to risk it in the stock market. They'll lose their shirts, of course, but it will be good for the Wall Street pros.
And in today's economy, with all of the blood in the streets, even the pros aren't sure what to do. Any investment that can be called safe is guaranteed to lose you money. A high-risk investment is likely to lose you even more money. Even Warren Buffett made a big investment in Goldman Sachs and lost a small fortune within a few days.
Conclusion:
If the big boys don't know what to do, what are small investors or savers expected to do? You can always put your money in the three safe investments mentioned above and hope that sanity will return to the economy. It's better to save money with a small gain than not to save at all.
A mutual fund or Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) is another possibility. The problem with both of these instruments is that they pretty much contain the same risks as individual stocks. When the stock market is going down across the board, where do
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