Franny
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Don’t forget Knight Capital. I wonder how many people who didn’t even know what Knight Capital was, let alone that they were customers/counterparties of Knight, will lose funds that they thought were safely in their brokerage accounts. Knight simply does not have the money to make good on the trades made on the day that they blew up.
Money market funds are definitely not a safe place. I keep my Vanguard cash in the shortest term U.S. Treasury obligation ETF available. For cash one may need soon that one is not willing to keep in the house TreasuryDirect is far safer than money market funds.
@Trivium
If you decide not to cash out the IRA, you certainly should make sure that it is not located with an institution that engages in prop trading, a la MF Global. There are other providers — I would stay away from banks and credit unions, they are leveraged too. I use Vanguard because it is owned by it’s customers via it’s funds. Less motive for theft. I also have some in a self-directed IRA which for low fees allows me to store gold in a depository near where I live. Make sure the depository will agree to security procedures to preclude the admin from stealing your gold without the depository’s collusion.So the Fed just can’t print money forever? D’oh!
What are the other practical, political and legal limits on Fed money printing? Obviously the Fed has learned that QE brings uncomfortably high food and energy prices and political heat. What will they try next? A lot of people are speculating that the Fed will go into the market and buy distressed mortgages at above market prices. What if the Fed loaded up on mortgages and ignored defaults, i.e. failed to foreclose on defaulting homeowners. That would be a creative way to drop money from helicopters.
It is not so much the getting locked out part that worries me, it is that they are so short staffed and/or inefficient that it takes them 5+ days to answer the damn phone.
Thanks for the good analysis. I have been using Treasury Direct for a while and only in the past week discovered the danger of letting the government hold your savings: government agencies are inefficient and often very dumb. Last Fall TD changed it’s security procedures. Since then they have locked out tens of thousands of customers who couldn’t correctly answer the (very poorly designed) security questions. You can’t get back in without talking to a human customer service representative, and guess what? There aren’t enough of them. Surprise, surprise. I was locked out of my account for five days because they asked me what was the first car I bought and I answered the make and model instead of just the model. I strongly suspect that I would still be locked out if I hadn’t called my Congressman and emailed my Senator about the problem. My numerous phone calls and emails were ignored until then. Within three hours of calling/emailing my representatives, I received a call back from a very competent person who quickly had my account unlocked.
At this point, I have little confidence that I won’t be “locked out” of my TD account when I need it.Ash, a Wiki article with no references is not exactly authoritative in a court of law. My point is, the defense of economic duress is often discussed but almost never sustained in any court. It is a layperson’s myth, not a real legal defense.
The problem is that they changed their security procedures last Fall and ever since then they have had a much larger number of customers locked out of their accounts for failure to answer security questions correctly. Their security questions system is dumb. A well designed list of questions yields only one possible answer, e.g. where did you meet your spouse, give only the city not the state. Theirs are too easy to forget. They don’t have nearly enough staff to answer or return all the calls of locked out customers and there is no way to get back in after lockout but talking to a human.
In my case, a call to my Congressman and email to my Senator resulted in me getting a callback within three hours. I am back in now. I am debating whether to leave my money there.
I am writing to retract my previous recommendation of Treasury Direct as a safe place to keep dollars. I have been locked out of my account for five days. Calls and emails go unanswered. I googled it and discovered that there are tens of thousands in the same boat. What a nightmare. Good thing I don’t actually need the money today.
