[ac29]

Low-risk yield doesn't grow on trees. 0.5% is about what a 3 year treasury bond was paying at the beginning of the month (its lower now). Banks dont really need deposits to make loans right now either, since the reserve ratio was changed to 0% last year.

So yes, safe, insured deposits in savings accounts dont pay much at the moment. This has less to do with banks being greedy and more to do with current fiscal policy.

[imtringued]

>This has less to do with banks being greedy and more to do with current fiscal policy.

It has more to do with the state of the economy demanding low interest rates. When you bail out banks like in 2008 deposits are seen to be perfectly safe and thus depositors aren't deterred by increasingly shrinking or even negative interest rates, they still want that perfectly secure bank deposit because the government will bail it out.

[gnicholas]

In the past I've shopped around and found that you can find personal bank accounts that pay small amounts of interest (~1% in recent years), but business bank accounts wouldn't pay anything. It's nice to see this option, which will hopefully draw some people and simultaneously convince competitors to offer similar products.

[ac29]

Yeah, a lot of credit unions especially have reward checking with ~1% rates. You always need to jump through some hoops like having direct deposit and a minimum number of transactions on their debit/credit cards (which is where they make the money to pay the extra interest). Still, if you can meet these requirements, its not a bad way to lessen the effect of inflation on money kept for day to day expenses in a checking account.