Do you have a brokerage account?
Financial advisors routinely recommend having anywhere from six months to several years of living expenses in cash or equivalents. Examples include a high yield savings account, a money market fund, or a CD ladder. But if you have a brokerage account, you may not need any of these.
A short term Treasury fund may fluctuate so little that it’s unmeaningful compared to a money market fund, while offering a better yield and full liquidity. It’s also arguably as safe if not safer than an FDIC insured account, because ultimately it’s the US Treasury that backs FDIC insurance. And there is no FDIC limit and you don’t have to complete paperwork to make a claim.
A brokerage account offers access to number of exchange traded funds that invest exclusively in short term Treasuries. One example is the iShares Short Treasury Bond fund SHV, which invests in Treasury bills from 0-1 year in maturity. Its price fluctuations are almost solely due to making monthly interest payments, which simply put the small price decrease into your account. With virtually all of the pluses and no risk of “breaking the buck”, it’s better than a money market fund.
There are other options as well. You can buy Treasury bills through your broker, or open an account directly with the US Treasury via Treasury Direct.
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Forgive me for being a cynic, but America is heading into an irresponsible financial boom
“If you thought quantitative easing (QE) was dead and buried, you may soon be in for a shock…”
>The Fed is cutting rates to combat rising inflation.
Huh? How does cutting interest rates lower inflation? If anything, it will cause inflation to go higher since the velocity of money should increase. In the game of monetary “hot potato,” they’re making the potato hotter and no one wants to hold onto it for long because it is a depreciating asset that has an ever decreasing yield.
>Soon it will add the extra “coup de whisky” of fresh T-bill purchases.
So the Federal Reserve is going to purchase Treasury bills and put more money into the system.
Isn’t the correct way to lower inflation decreasing money supply and raising interest rates to a high enough level that velocity falls? The Federal Reserve is doing the exact opposite. The excuses of needing to meet the demands of the federal government is no excuse at all; after all, the Federal Reserve is supposed to be an independent institution which enables it to focus on properly managing the currency without fear of government interference.
Is Evans-Pritchard even worth reading? I’ve known about him since the 2000s and he has always seemed more a central bank propagandist than a real reporter or analyst.
Yeah that bit about cutting rates to combat inflation caught my eye too. Seems counter to his broader point, let alone conventional wisdom. A slip of the pen? Deliberate irony? I don’t know.
The thing that gets me is talk like the Fed needs to add more juice to ensure to smooth functioning of the financial system. Money market rates have become unstable. Maybe rates need to fluctuate more. Too much of the Fed’s activity just subsidizes high finance at the expense of ordinary people. Let some things break; let some high rollers lose money. These things keep happening because the disincentives are neutralized and the losses socialized. That part of the system needs to shrink. Start thinking about regular people for a change.
Maybe rates should be higher. It might provide some relief to the long suffering 99%, including folks looking for decent yields on their savings.
Good point about the Fed supposedly being an independent institution. All the noise about its independence falling under threat is a smoke screen belying the fact that it never has been independent. If it’s not dancing to the federal government’s tune it’s dancing to Wall Street’s. It sure hasn’t been to the average American’s.
Gold is the safest money, investors should be overweight in times of war and devaluation – Ray Dalio
Mega’s weekend dispatch:- Decision time
Trump needs to make a choice, where to get his oil?
Right now he imports a heavy a Russian sour crude call “Mazut”. As i understand it the US mix the light sweet oil from Fracking with Mazut to form DIESEL.
America runs of Diesel & if Trump try’s to Heat up the War in Ukraine he can kiss goodbye to Russia Mazut. There are two other possible sources:-
Iran
&
Venezuela
It explains just WHY the US is SO keen on a “Colour revolution” in Iran, using Israel as political cover. This didn’t go too well…….Iran left the barn door open a bit & the usual suspects tried to push it open all the way. Iran has now closed & bolted the door…….they are far too tough & could inflict MEGA damage EVERYWHERE…………
Russian has refused point blank to a “Freeze” on the battlelines, it would only give Trump time before a refreshed attack……so that leaves one option….Venezuela.
While the leftist government is not that popular an US intervention would change that in a heart beat. I remember Fidel Castro delight at the bay of pigs or as they say in Vietnam “Only the Americans could make the Communists popular”
Whatever, time is running out & this is where the rubber hits the road.
Mike
How AI’s spiraling power demands could slow consumer spending
All this … and it still can’t fix a leaky faucet.
Wall Street says tokenization will change global markets. Gold is next.
As the article points out, there are already cryptocurrencies that are backed by gold. Question for bitcoin fans: Why isn’t yours?
For investors that do determine that a move out of money funds is warranted, the first step to consider is moving out on the treasury curve, for example, a treasury ETF with a duration of two to five years.
A simple alternative, one I use myself, is to use a combination of SHV and GOVT. SHV covers 0-1 years maturity. GOVT spans 1-30 years, but is weighted towards the shorter end of that range so that its net maturity is about 5-7 years. Adjusting the weightings of the two can give you a net maturity anywhere between. As noted before, SHV alone is very close to a money market fund.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/11/03/oil-prices-rise-opec-production-halt-ftse-100/
On a somewhat related topic, Berkshire Hathaway is sitting on $382B of U.S. Treasury bills.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/berkshires-cash-pile-hits-record-382-billion-amid-continued-stock-sales-t-bill-purchases
Over his long investing career, Buffett has been good at knowing when the general market is overpriced (although he seems to have a blind spot for bank frauds) so his past actions when holding such a large cash position would seem to suggest it’s a wise move to raise cash and sell down overpriced assets. That is, assuming Buffett has lost his edge or his marbles, the end of the party is not far off.
Speaking of blind spots, Buffett may be stock picker extraordinaire, but his genius doesn’t seem to extend much beyond that. Reducing the asset class proposition to choosing between stocks and TBills is wearing blinders. His dismissal of gold has cost Berkshire billions.
His argument against gold boils down to comparing it with stocks. Yet he has hundreds of billions in cash. Not to mention gold has outperformed even stocks since the turn of the century … over twenty five years.
No doubt stocks are overpriced, especially US teracaps. I own stocks but diversify beyond cap weighted indices. Not a good risk reward proposition. But no asset class lives in a vacuum; it’s always how it stacks up among the alternatives.