WASHINGTON - Interest rates on four-week Treasury bills fell to zero in Tuesday's auction, as investors still sought the safety of government securities without any return on their investment.
The Treasury Department says it sold $32 billion in four-week bills at an interest rate of zero percent. That meant investors were willing to earn no return at all on their money as long as they cold park it in the safety of Treasury securities.
The rate was down from an interest rate of 0.04 percent at last week's government auction of four-week bills.
So investors are more than happy to put their money into T-bills that will offer no return for their investment, rather than risk the money into other types of stock and bond investments. This tells me that investors are scared of what is happening in the U.S. economy, and are not willing to take any sort of risk on anything. I wonder if this is a short-term holding pattern until January, 2009, when we leave the failed Bush administration for a new Barack Obama administration. Investors may just be parking their money for the holiday season, until they learn what President-elect Barack Obama's plans are for recovering the contracting U.S. economy. Still, this says something about just how bad this U.S. economy has gotten, and at how many people are simply waiting for the transition of power within the Oval Office.
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