Buried on page B7, under the market tables nobody reads, is the most actionable number in Wednesday’s paper.
Bankrate’s weekly survey of major banks puts the national average money-market yield at 0.44%. In the very same table, the best nationally available federally insured money-market account pays 4.20%.
That is not a typo, a teaser rate, or a different asset class. It is the same product, with the same federal insurance, at two different institutions.
The whole table, because the pattern holds
The national averages, as of Tuesday: money market 0.44%, one-month CD 0.92%, three-month 1.39%, six-month 1.89%, one-year 2.05%, five-year 1.75%.
The best nationally available insured offers in the same survey: six-month CD 4.30%, one-year 4.45%, two-year 4.45%, five-year 4.50%.
At every maturity the gap is roughly two to four percentage points. And the weekly-change line on the national-average table is almost entirely zeros — the averages did not move at all. That is the tell: the institutions paying 0.44% are not slowly catching up. They are not trying to.
Why the gap exists
Because it works. Large traditional banks know that most depositors will not move, and deposits that do not move are the cheapest funding a bank can have. Nothing about this is secret or improper. It is simply priced for inattention.
The Journal made the same point in its coverage of how a rate increase transmits: high-yield accounts at online banks could reprice within days or weeks, while large traditional banks are less likely to pass much of it to depositors. A Fed increase widens this gap rather than closing it.
What it is worth, concretely
As an illustration rather than a sourced figure: on a $50,000 emergency reserve, the difference between 0.44% and 4.20% is about $1,880 a year before taxes. On $100,000 it is roughly $3,760. Those are round-number arithmetic on the two published rates, not a projection — rates move, and a money-market yield is not fixed.
Put next to the rest of this edition, the contrast is almost funny. Elsewhere in the same paper, pension funds are being told they must take twice as much risk to earn what bonds used to pay them. Hedge funds are running leveraged basis trades for a few basis points. And here, available to anyone with a laptop and a routing number, is several percentage points of extra yield on federally insured money, for the price of an afternoon.
The honest caveats
Three, and they matter.
Insurance limits are per person, per institution. The $250,000 figure is the ceiling; balances above it need structuring across institutions or ownership categories.
A CD is a commitment. Locking five years at 4.50% is a real decision with an early-withdrawal penalty attached, and it is a different instrument from a money-market account that can be drawn on tomorrow. Emergency money should stay liquid.
Rates change. A money-market yield can fall as easily as it rose. What is durable here is not the 4.20% — it is the habit of checking, because the gap between the average and the best offer has persisted through every rate environment.
Nobody has to forecast the Fed to fix this one. It takes a statement, fifteen minutes, and the willingness to look up a number the bank has no reason to send you.