patrick.net

thunderlips11 says

DrPepper says

John public runs the risk of waking up one day and finding their financial instution of choice bankrupt beacuse of exposure or bad debts to Europe. If the IMF ends up bankrolling more bailouts then American tax payers will get to pony up.

Already happened: MF Global.

Yup, and over the weekend I think we heard the amount of missing money is double whats been reported. Its pretty damn sad, wake up one day and through no fault of your own your account is frozen and mabye the bankruptcy trustee will give you some money back. All the while the TBTF banks jockey for position in the front of the line ahead of customers which should be universally criticized from the politicians yet they remain silent.

corntrollio says

Investing in foreign currencies is not risk-free. You have to know what you're doing. That's not to say it should never be done, but it shouldn't be done casually. Anyway, I doubt you've even tried to open an account in Mongolia and are speaking merely hypothetically.

A number of years ago I was thinking of investing in foreign bonds.

Now if you can sink 450K into south african bonds then you can get above 3%..otherwise it is Brazil and that is pretty risky
https://www.everbank.com/personal/rates.aspx?tab=currencies

Rates are low world wide. Brazil gives a high rate...but there's some stipulations about how that works.

I think domestic muni bonds have higher rates although the maturity rate is longer.

DrPepper says

Yup, and over the weekend I think we heard the amount of missing money is double whats been reported. Its pretty damn sad, wake up one day and through no fault of your own your account is frozen and mabye the bankruptcy trustee will give you some money back. All the while the TBTF banks jockey for position in the front of the line ahead of customers which should be universally criticized from the politicians yet they remain silent.

True. More disturbing is apparently what MF Global did was legal, that is, using customer's accounts to invest in pretty much any equity class they wanted.

No doubt the mainstream media - outside a handful of business publications - will avoid making this aspect part of regular stories.

If Joe Sixpack was aware that the ultimate account holder - who is usually NOT the financial firm he choose and whose logo graces the office he visits - can speculate freely with his money, there would be a helluva crisis of confidence.

Or not, since everybody seems determined to avoid talking about bad news, bad laws, and bad policy and prefers to blame it on a few bad apples or laziness. Which itself is lazy.

mdovell says

Now if you can sink 450K into south african bonds then you can get above 3%..otherwise it is Brazil and that is pretty risky
https://www.everbank.com/personal/rates.aspx?tab=currencies
Rates are low world wide. Brazil gives a high rate...but there's some stipulations about how that works.

Well, that's just Everbank though. Those rates are a joke and won't come anywhere near beating inflation in many of those countries. If you get rates at a local bank, it'd likely be far higher than Everbank's.

For example, Everbank quotes 2% for short-term money for India, but you can apparently get 7% on a short-term CD from the SBI:

http://www.rupeetimes.com/compare/fixed_deposits/state_bank_of_india.html

I think Brazil's central bank rate is 11.5% now. I really wouldn't use Everbank as a comparison.

Well that would be a interesting argument...we tend to have some states subsidize others. Alaska has this to attract people..the states along the gulf coast also are subsidized. It would be interesting to see what would happen if say Alaska went bankrupt and what it would do simply because the energy markets.

The dollar is not on a gold standard but oil is priced in dollars.