Word: yield
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
While the Treasury auction grabbed headlines, corporate bonds are doing equally amazing things: the average yield on lower-quality investment-grade corporate bonds - triple-B rated - is hovering around 10%, an unusually rich 7.5-percentage-point spread over Treasury bonds of similar maturity. (That spread has tripled over the past year.) Or consider junk bonds, as measured by Merrill Lynch's High Yield bond index, which yield a jaw-dropping 22%. Of course, junk bonds come from the riskiest borrowers, and a deep recession could drive up the default rate among those companies. But current lofty yields imply investor expectations...
...Program, or TARP, and have argued against taking money from the modernization fund. Pelosi relented only after Friday's job report - the worst in 34 years, showing that the economy shed more than 533,000 jobs last month. But, having made this concession, Dems said they were unlikely to yield more ground. "This is a bad choice that we have to make. We should be able to use TARP money. The White House doesn't want to do that. So we have to use money that is designated for an innovative purpose," Pelosi tersely told reporters on Capitol Hill Monday...
Beleaguered financial institutions looking to shore up their funding are battling for your deposit dollars, driving interest rates on bank products abnormally high. At first glance, that's fantastic news for consumers who are finding CDs that yield 4% and money-market accounts that pay 3%. But the competition for money - which will surely intensify as new bank holding companies like Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and American Express amp up efforts to attract deposits - is also squeezing banks' profit margins, further straining an already weak industry and stressing smaller banks, many of which didn't go hog wild making risky...
Consider that the average yield on a one-year CD is 2.39%, the same as it was in mid-August, according to a weekly survey by Bankrate.com, even though the prime rate - the rate at which banks lend to their most creditworthy customers - has fallen from 5% to 4%. That means a bank that used to borrow at about 2.5% and lend at 5% now borrows at 2.5% and lends at 4% - an entire percentage point has been stripped from the bank's ability to make money. More than half of all banks saw their net interest margin - a measure...
...could someone else offer a higher rate? Chances are, the bidder wasn't looking to make a profit - just trying to inject liquidity into the institution's balance sheet - or was pursuing riskier investments in order to make the transaction make sense. "When a bank chases yield, they then start making riskier investments or riskier loans," says Fine of the Independent Community Bankers of America. That's not something we particularly need more of right...