Ross Ramsey, the managing editor at The Texas Tribune, writes a column for The Tribune.

Expanded coverage of Texas is produced by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit news organization. To join the conversation about this article, go to texastribune.org.

Texas is a lock for Republicans at the statewide level, from the president on down.

It’s hard to find anyone to even talk about the viability of Democrats at the top of the ballot here. They haven’t won a statewide election since 1994. Most of our children — even the ones with jobs and houses of their own — are too young to remember the last time a Democrat won a presidential race here. (It was Jimmy Carter, in 1976, who beat Gerald Ford by just over three percentage points.) The people born that year are in their mid-30s.

So color the state red and stop talking about the electoral map. Talk instead about the financial primary.

Texas is hugely important in that one, and the list of visitors for this season — both the recent ones and those just ahead — includes most of the Republican presidential candidates and the president himself. Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, made a stop in San Antonio, and he wasn’t there for the puffy tacos. Tim Kaine of Virginia, a Democrat who’s running for Senate in another state more than a thousand miles away, has Texas on the list of places where he’ll drag the sack. Speaker John A. Boehner is on the list, presumably to take some of the load off the rich donors in Ohio.

Texas is not alone in this — what do you think Rick Perry was doing in San Francisco earlier this year? The color spectrum there runs from Democratic Blue to Political Green. He might not get any votes in the primary there, but the financial map isn’t the same as the electoral map. The money is in the big states, like you’d expect: California, New York, Texas, Florida and Illinois.

In the 2008 election cycle, presidential candidates raised $1.33 billion nationwide, according to the Federal Election Commission. Of that, $75.4 million came from Texas, and it was only the second presidential election cycle in 30 years without someone from Texas named Bush on the national ticket.

The numbers are smaller so far this year — it’s early — but this crop of presidential aspirants has raised $66.9 million nationally, $3.9 million of it in Texas.

That’s only a slice of the pie. Those are the amounts given to candidates directly and don’t include contributions to political action committees, Super PACs and other political organizations. The Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign finance, reports that Texans gave $195.4 million to federal candidates and PACs combined during the 2008 election cycle. In the current round, they’ve given $38.1 million.

By the center’s accounting, federal candidates have raised about 10 percent of their money in Texas during the current election season. The state also has a large number of really wealthy people, the ones who can write large checks to Super PACs and other political outfits that don’t have limits on what contributors can give.

The voters aren’t tuned in to most races. Some have a passing or early interest in the presidential race, but it remains a sideshow for normal people, who will pay attention as the ads start and the primaries come closer and it’s time to make a decision.

The pundits are talking about electoral maps and who needs to win in Iowa, South Carolina and Nevada.

That’s on the candidates’ radar as well. But their focus is really on money. Without money, there can be no campaign — certainly not a major one, with its need for expensive travel and advertising and polling and voter contact. Especially advertising.

A national campaign — or a big expensive campaign in this state or that — can’t make it without money from Texas. Ten percent is a big number, and if candidates can raise it by eating a couple of bacon-wrapped shrimp at a mansion in Houston or Dallas every month or so, that’s time well spent.

They can worry about voters later.

rramsey@texastribune.org

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Volatility in equity markets is burning smart-money players, and even experienced traders are finding it hard to keep up.

Some fund managers have been dipping back into stocks to pick up bargains but could end up in a value trap if equities fall into a bear market and the economy falls into recession.

Others are taking a wait-and-see approach after getting blindsided by market swings not seen at least since the financial crisis — and by some measures well before that.

Most are unlikely to dive back in given fears over Europes debt crisis and fears of a second recession in the United States that sent equity markets sliding over the summer.

The $2 trillion hedge fund industry — often seen as the smartest of the smart — will ultimately play an important role in whether stocks can rise over the long-term. Uncertainty there means more of the same churning action and precipitous falls without that wall of money to act as a back stop.

Gross exposures have come down industrywide and large bets in either direction have also decreased because of the volatility, said Robert Francello, head of equity trading a Apex Capital, a hedge fund in San Francisco.

Francello said that as well, short-selling bans on banks in parts of Europe were hurting liquidity no question.

A recent survey of hedge fund managers found that bearish sentiment rocketed in August to its highest level in a year.

The survey by BarclayHedge and TrimTabs Investment Research showed bearish sentiment rose to 42 percent in August from 27 percent in July.

It also revealed very bearish views on the economy. About 56 percent think the US economy is already in recession or will slip into recession soon, and just 3 percent say economic growth is set to accelerate.

For Sam Ginzburg, head of capital markets at First New York Securities, where he trades his firms capital, the binary situation is presenting investors with something akin to a zero sum game.

Theres a lot of money to be made or lost right now, he said. If you have a view, meaning this isnt 2008 all over again and you think things are going to settle out and you start buying some of the mega-cap, big-cap stocks that will do well as the economy does better — or vice versa — the amount of money you can make is astounding, he said.

But for Ginzburg that time is not now. He said his fund was still light compared with the amount of money he could invest.

Over the summer the Samp;P 500 index, a broad measure of US large-cap stocks, crashed 17 percent in just 14 trading days between July 21 and August 10. For investors, that was one of the most trying periods on record, and they are just not ready to start taking on big bets.

One market veteran who runs a proprietary trading firm in New York told his traders they could go to zero (and) get the hell out of here in August as the firms inventories shrunk to just 15-20 percent of what they could be.

Its just like betting on horses, he said. That two-week period was the hardest I have ever had to deal with.

Joseph Mazzella, a senior trader at Knight Capital, agreed. Knight has one of the biggest retail books in the business and deals with a host of institutional clients.

This is the most difficult trading environment Ive ever seen, Mazzella said. Performance has struggled, its a really difficult year.

Many hedge funds cut bullish bets that they put on in the first half of the year, and comparisons with the financial meltdown of 2008-2009 abound.

There is a lot of pain out there, said Mazzella. These guys have just been whipsawed like crazy.

Earlier in the year many hedge funds built up bullish positions in growth-oriented stocks — bets that are likely to have been cut over the summer.

Data compiled by Credit Suisse from filings with regulators show that up until the end of June hedge funds were overweight stocks that are expected to do well in a growth environment.

But Pankaj Patel, the Credit Suisse analyst who compiled the data, said given what he is hearing from hedge fund clients, he expects many of them have become much more defensive.

They are not telling us that they are taking a defensive move but talking to them you could sense that, he said. Before they were not asking about the economy.

Options activity suggests uncertainty is running high.

Todd Salamone, an analyst at Schaeffers Investment Research, said an increase in early September in downside protection in the form of put option buying on major exchange-traded funds based on equity indexes suggests some funds are hedging renewed equity exposure.

However, a lack of call buying on CBOE Volatility index options, which are another hedging vehicle for fund managers, sends the opposite signal.

There is not a consensus there, and that is why we are having this choppiness, said Salomone.

In terms of institutional flows Knights Mazzella has been seeing a flight to defensive bets.

The only thing we see is a very defensive shift: utilities, healthcare, consumer staples; everything else is for sale, he said. People are playing technology a little bit but everybodys leery so its very much defensive positioning.

We went from no protection being bought in the market to massive protection, and massive defensive positioning, he said. So if you want to play the contrarian angle we probably went too far again.

(Reporting by Edward Krudy; Editing by Leslie Adler)

A Staten Island couple stole at least $2.5 million in federal funds meant for nutritious meals for preschoolers, prosecutors asserted in a criminal complaint unsealed on Friday.

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The Red Apple Child Development Center chain includes a preschool at 42-31 Colden Street in Flushing, Queens.

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Ziming Shen, just freed on bail, scuffled with a photographer in Brooklyn on Friday.

The complaint accused the couple, Joanna Fan and her husband, Ziming Shen, of siphoning money over five years from accounts at the nonprofit Red Apple Child Development Center preschool chain, of which Ms. Fan, also known as Xiao Ping, is the executive director. The complaint accused the couple of using the money to make mortgage payments on several Manhattan condominiums and to benefit their private business interests, which include Preschool of America Inc., a chain of about a dozen for-profit preschools in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.

The couple surrendered to agents of the United States Agriculture Department on Friday morning and were arraigned before Magistrate Judge James Orenstein of United States District Court in Brooklyn. They pleaded not guilty and posted bail of $750,000 each.

The judge restricted their movement to parts of New York and ordered them to surrender their passports.

“They’re going to defend this vigorously, and obviously all the facts have not come out,” Barry W. Agulnick, Mr. Shen’s lawyer, said after the arraignment.

The charge, theft from programs receiving federal funds, is punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a fine, said Robert Nardoza, a spokesman for the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York. “As alleged in the complaint, this amounts to one of the largest lunch money thefts in history,” Mr. Nardoza said.

Red Apple Child Development Center runs six preschools in Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Staten Island. Between 2002 and 2010, the preschools received $13.5 million from the Agriculture Department through a program intended to help institutions provide healthy meals and snacks to children and adults.

Audits by the New York State Health Department and the federal Agriculture Department since 2005 revealed a pattern of false submissions to the Agriculture Department, including lying about how many children were getting the meals, the complaint charges. For example, the complaint says, in January 2009, Ms. Fan submitted records claiming that 188 children had consumed 4,700 meals and snacks, when other records showed that 116 children ate 2,900 meals and snacks.

The complaint charges that in 2008, Ms. Fan issued a check for $200,000 from the federal lunch money account to make personal condominium payments, and also withdrew $110,000 to pay her personal income taxes. Between 2005 and 2010, the complaint asserts, $2.7 million went to Supermarnet, a company Mr. Shen owned, to provide meals to the preschoolers. But the complaint said invoices indicate the company spent only $24,000 for food during that period.

In all, according to the complaint, Ms. Fan stole approximately $1.8 million of program funds in 2008 and 2009. She acknowledged in a written statement to the Agriculture Department that she had taken the money, but stated that she had “borrowed” it, the complaint charged.

Ms. Fan has been a trustee of Red Apple since it was founded in 1997, and a review of recent federal tax records showed that the couple has profited in other ways. The corporation paid Mr. Shen $455,000 in 2008 for classroom rent. Ms. Fan received $105,000 annually for her work as executive director.

Red Apple had revenue of roughly $11 million in 2008. Previous annual filings showed that about half of that was from federal payments.

In August 2004, John C. Liu, the city comptroller, who was then a city councilman, spoke in support of the organization. It had been cut off from receiving city contracts for three years because a Red Apple executive allegedly tried to bribe a city inspector to ignore a falsified certificate of occupancy, The Daily News reported at the time.

A spokesman for Mr. Liu said he believed at that time that that Red Apple should again receive city funds because it had cut ties with that official and because it remained the largest provider of prekindergarten services to the Asian community.

But Mr. Liu was also sensitive to appearances; according to the spokesman, Matthew Sweeney, in July 2004 Mr. Liu returned a $500 campaign contribution that Ms. Fan had given him nine days earlier, piqued because Ms. Fan had asked for a meeting immediately after sending in the money. “Other than that, no money has been accepted from anyone at this company,” Mr. Sweeney said on Friday.

Last year, the City Education Department sent the comptroller two contracts with Red Apple for prekindergarten, totaling just over $1 million. They lacked extra monitoring that was required after the bribery charges, and they were not approved, the comptroller’s office said. There are no active Red Apple contracts with the city.

Noah Rosenberg contributed reporting.

Japanese return cash recovered after tsunami

In a testament to Japans culture of honesty, finders have turned in $78 million to authorities and some have waived their right to the money even when the rightful owners cannot be found.

LANSING, Mich. –
Social services groups and state officials are scrambling to prevent thousands of low-income Michigan residents from having their heat cut off after a state-run program that helped pay overdue utility bills for the poor lost its source of funds.

A state appeals court in July struck down the financing system used by Michigans Low Income and Energy Efficiency Fund, and the state Legislature has not enacted a new one. With the program now running out of money as winter approaches, state officials are working to tide over needy families at least until Nov. 1, when they will be protected from a utility shut-off by state law.

SAN DIEGO — Up the stairs from the Chicken of the Sea offices in the northern reaches of this city, two brothers and about three dozen of their employees mine databases in a fledgling effort to help Americans retire a little sooner and manage their money a little better.

Bucks

How to Rate 401(k) Plans and Investment Advisers

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Ron Lieber writes the Your Money column, which appears in The Times on Saturdays.

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In 2009, Mike and Ryan Alfred, now 30 and 28 years old, introduced a rating for most of the big 401(k) plans and gave poor scores to many of them. In Act 2, the brothers and their company, BrightScope, put the names and disciplinary records of thousands of stockbrokers and investment advisers up on the Web where anyone could find them.

While the data provides plenty of utility for consumers, BrightScope aims to make money by selling detailed reports to retirement plan administrators, mutual fund companies and investment advisers.

And for their trouble, the brothers have been called all sorts of names in industry publications. Their tactics, according to the complainers, hold investment advisers “hostage” and feel like “extortion.” They’re a front, perhaps, for plaintiffs lawyers. Or they are simply “sinister.”

If this all sounds familiar, it’s because the same thing happened when Morningstar turned unflattering spotlights on the mutual fund industry, and when Zagat, TripAdvisor and Yelp started ranking various businesses.

Those four companies have proved their legitimacy, or at least their staying power. And now the brothers Alfred face a similar test: Are they just a couple of punk kids who will flame out, or will their efforts help us all have more money sooner than we might otherwise?

THE BEGINNING BrightScope began not with the Alfred brothers but with their co-founder, Dan Weeks. While the brothers are all steely-eyed intensity, Mr. Weeks, 51, is way out on the jolly spectrum. That demeanor has been a big help, given all of the feathers BrightScope has ruffled.

In 2007, Mr. Weeks was an engineering manager at Hewlett-Packard struggling to understand his 401(k) plan. He built a Flash application to sort out his risk tolerance and fund choices and showed it to his real estate lawyer, who happens to be the father of the Alfred brothers.

Mr. Weeks’s lawyer suggested that he show the tool to his entrepreneurial sons, and the three began brainstorming over glasses of Maker’s Mark. “We had been thinking a lot about 401(k) plans, but we still couldn’t search and find out how good one plan was,” Mike Alfred said. “So we decided to build a rating.” Mike now serves as chief executive of BrightScope, while his brother Ryan is president. Mr. Weeks is chief operating officer.

The Alfred brothers weren’t exactly coming at this cold. Mike had traded stocks as a Stanford undergraduate and Ryan completed finance internships during his summers at Harvard. They both worked for their father when he was in the insurance industry, and the brothers also operated their own investment advisory business.

But they were not 401(k) experts. Still, the three raised some money from angel investors in the San Diego area, and the brothers flew to Washington to see how easy it would be to extract filings about companies’ 401(k) plans from the Labor Department. It took them several hours to print just 20 company reports.

That pace wouldn’t do, so the brothers began flooding the Labor Department with Freedom of Information Act requests, asking for hard drives full of 401(k) filings. “They said ours was one of the most onerous they had ever received,” Ryan Alfred said, smirking ever so slightly.

At the same time, the brothers e-mailed anyone they could think of who might persuade the Labor Department to make all the information available electronically. After about nine months of pestering, they succeeded. “We were so obnoxious, we were like mosquitoes” Mike Alfred said. “They had to kill us eventually.”

(Jason Surbey, a Labor Department spokesman, said that BrightScope wasn’t the only company asking for the information.)

THE 401(K) PRODUCTS BrightScope soon published scores of consumer ratings, and it eventually added 403(b) retirement plan rankings, too, for nonprofit groups. Eventually, it became clear that its data had even more value to two other groups.

First, the company created Spyglass, a service for retirement plan consultants who want to help smaller employers. It allows someone making a pitch to know just how high the target client’s fees are and how poorly the mutual funds in its plan have been performing.

Meanwhile, the biggest moneymaker for BrightScope in the next year or so will probably be something called Beacon. Here, BrightScope provides data to the fund companies showing which employer retirement plans own their funds, which ones don’t and which employers own competitor funds that haven’t been performing well.

Half a dozen BrightScope employees spend all day sorting through the data that flows in from the Labor Department. Those six are in a room of about 35 people, including programmers, sales people and others, probably more than local fire codes allow.

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* Three-month dollar Libor touches fresh 13-month highs

* Risk premiums rise despite less liquidity fears

* Central bank move not seen solving euro zone debt woes

* Traders await political solution to a political problem
(Updates US action; changes dateline, previous LONDON)

By Richard Leong

NEW YORK, Sept 16 (Reuters) – Key lending rates crept up on
Friday after a coordinated move among central banks to pump
dollars into European banks did little to dispel worries about
the euro zone debt crisis.

Investors and traders are holding out hopes for aggressive
measures from European policy-makers to come up with a firewall
for European banks in case debt-laden Greece defaults.

On Friday, US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told EU
finance ministers they should end loose talk about a euro zone
break-up and work more closely with the European Central Bank
to tackle the debt crisis. For details, see [ID:nL3E7KG0KC]

There is a high degree of nervousness and a low degree of
confidence in European financials, said Stephen Wood, chief
market strategist at Russell Investments in New York, which
manages $163 billion worldwide.

Persistent jitters over the soundness of French banks due
to their exposure to Italy and Greece hammered the shares of
BNP Paribas (BNPP.PA) and Credit Agricole (CAGR.PA).
[ID:nL5E7KG2GU]

On Wednesday, Moodys Investors Service downgraded Credit
Agricole and Societe Generale (SOGN.PA), citing increased
concerns about their funding and liquidity profiles in light of
worsening refinancing conditions. It left the ratings of the
biggest French bank BNP on review for downgrade.

Anxiety about more bad news from Europe over the weekend
spurred safehaven buying of US Treasury bills, pushing their
rates below zero on Friday.

While central banks show willingness to help European
banks, there have been no signs of progress among euro zone
officials to deal with solvency problems threatening the
17-nation block, analysts said.

You have a political problem with an economic outcome.
Ultimately you need a political solution, Wood said.

In the wholesale lending market, the London interbank
offered rate for three-month dollars USD3MFSR= touched a
fresh 13-month high at 0.35133 percent. It has risen nearly 10
basis points since late July.

Libor is a benchmark for more than $350 trillion worth of
financial products worldwide.

Libor for three-month euros EUR3MFSR= climbed to 1.48375
percent, matching its highest level in two weeks. For more on
Fridays Libor fixings, see [ID:nEAP000028]

While the benchmark interbank rate continued to climb, the
borrowing rate for dollars in the foreign exchange market
stabilized. Some dollar-strapped banks have turned to the
currency market because money market funds and other
traditional investors curtailed lending to them due to their
exposure to peripheral European countries.

The cost of raising three-month dollars through the cross
currency basis swap market EURCBS3M=ICAP last stood minus
89.5 basis points, flat on the day. It fell sharply on Thursday
after the central banks dollar loan announcement. It touched
the most expensive level in a year at minus 125 basis points
earlier this week.

HIGH ANXIETY

Major central banks around the world said on Thursday they
would cooperate to offer banks access to three-month dollar
loans [ID:nL5E7KF3RA] — removing a key source of money markets
stress built over recent weeks.

The move failed to stop the rise in Libor, but kept fears
about funding problems among euro zone banks from escalating,
analysts said.

Still risk premiums in the dollar loan market generally
rose on the day after they fell briefly in earlier trading.

It just alleviated some of the immediate concerns about
dollar funding. I dont know if its going to have a tremendous
long-term effect, said Alex Manzara, vice president at TJM
Futures in Chicago.

The spread between three-month dollar Libor and the
overnight indexed swap rate on three-month dollars
USD3MOIS=RR was 29.6 basis points — its widest level since
late July 2010 — from 29.4 basis points late Thursday.

Another gauge of investor jitters — the spread between
three-month Libor and three-month Treasury bill rate US3MT=RR
– rose 1 basis point to 35 basis points.

Manzara said another reason for the rise in three-month
Libor was the level of September eurodollar futures EDU1
which will expire on Monday.

The Sept. eurodollar contract last traded at 99.6475,
implying a three-month Libor of 0.3525 percent, which is only a
tad above Fridays fixing level.

We are getting the final convergence right now between
cash and futures, Manzara said.
(Additional reporting by William James in London; Editing by
Andrew Hay)

–>

Boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. doesnt mind if people hate him. Hes going to be who he is, not ashamed of his wealth of talent and cash. He will readily remind you of both.

Mayweathers nickname, Money, is more than a moniker; its his lifestyle.

He lives in a 22,000-square-foot Las Vegas mansion. He drives custom Rolls Royces and Maybachs. He hangs out with celebrities like 50 Cent. He once flaunted his fortune by burning a $100 bill in a nightclub.

For Saturdays fight against WBC welterweight champion Victor Ortiz, he will probably earn more than $30 million, depending on pay-per-view sales. And Mayweather is one of the kings of pay-per-view sales. His 2007 fight against Oscar De La Hoya had 2.5 million buys at $55 each (in the United States).

Hes made a (bad) name for himself, with a reason.

He showed up on the scene not as a big puncher, not as a knockout artist, not as a guy who is going to excite fans that way but as a great pure boxer who felt he was being underappreciated, said Max Kellerman, an HBO boxing analyst and CNN contributor. And the louder he started to talk, the more attention he would get.

Kellerman compared it to being cast in an action movie.

The role of the good guy was already taken, so he took the role of the bad guy, he said.

The bad guy persona has been helped by troubles outside the ring. He has feuded with his father, most recently on the HBO documentary series 24/7, where the two almost came to blows during a break in a training session. Junior and Senior crassly insulted each other, and the younger Mayweather denigrated his father as a trainer (his uncle Roger has held that position — except during a suspension — since Junior fired Senior) and then demanded that the eldest Mayweather get the F out of the gym.

After he was isolated in a dressing room, Money continued to rant.

Roger Mayweather made the Mayweather name (as a two-time world champion) … and I took it to the next level. And when its all said and done, there are only two (bleepin) Mayweathers that count: Roger Mayweather and Floyd Mayweather. And (motherbleeper), Im not no junior, Junior says at the end of the five-minute argument and tirade.

The problems dont end with family squabbles. Mayweather is also the defendant in six court cases, HBO reported (HBO, like CNN, is owned by Time Warner). The boxer says that hes innocent and that people are just trying to cash in and get money from a rich target.

One of the people suing him is Manny Pacquiao, widely considered the best fighter of any size.

The boxing public wants — demands — that the two fight before they get too old and their marvelous skills erode. But Mayweather wants 33-year-old Pacquiao to take a Olympic-style random drug test, which Mayweather says he does before every fight. The Pacquiao camp said no and sued when they thought Mayweather was calling their fighter a drug cheat.

So instead, Mayweather fights Ortiz, who is 24, 10 years his junior. Oddsmakers clearly favor Mayweather, who is 41-0 and a five-time world champion. Boxing experts clearly favor Money, too.

But as Kellerman and others point out, the likely result will come after some struggle. Ortiz is a bigger fighter and a hard puncher who, unlike most boxers, leads with his right hand.

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64

By Deborah Levine, MarketWatch

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — For investors unsettled by repeat warnings of debt crises and economic slumps, cash deserves a second look. And a third and fourth.

Thanks to the exposure of many money-market funds to European bank debt, and the ultralow yields on other cash-like alternatives, allocating a bigger chunk of your savings to cash requires a reassessment of your risk — and the type of reward you expect.

The first thing to consider is how long you expect to keep your funds in cash. For some, that can be three to five years, making certificates of deposit more attractive. For those who want to access the cash within six months, high-yield savings and money-market funds may offer a better option.

Choosing the right vehicle for cash savings also depends on how soon you expect interest rates to rise, which is a big wild card. Interest-rate-futures traders and Wall Street economists expect the Federal Reserve to raise its target fed funds rate sometime between spring and fall of 2012 — about a year away.

Hopes for the economy’s rebound were pushed out further after a very weak payrolls report for June.
Read about June payrolls report.

But they’ve been forecasting rate hikes a year off for at least the past year, and these predictions have fallen flat thanks to the economy’s unusually slow and uneven recovery. For those who expect the Fed to keep benchmark rates low for longer, analysts advise looking for alternatives to money-market funds, whose rates are closely tied to the fed funds rate, which is near 0%.

And lastly, investors who are happy to keep a portion of their savings in a money-market fund should check the fund’s literature to determine how much it holds in European bank debt — a potential source of credit risk if Greece or another European country defaults.

Checking, savings options

With all these alternatives, some financial advisers recommend investors look at online savings accounts or high-yield checking accounts as offering the best choices for yield, safety and easy access.

Click to Play

Looking for signs of a rebound

There's no silver lining in the jobs report but economists are still not giving up on signals of a turnaround, Societe Generale economist Stephen Gallagher explains.

“For liquid cash, people are better served with online savings accounts or high-yield checking accounts,” said Greg McBride, senior financial analyst at BankRate.com.

“As long as it’s protected by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., it doesn’t matter if the bank is across the street or across the country,” he said.

Some online banks are offering 1.1% for their online savings accounts, according to Bankrate.com. That’s
See rates on Bankrate.com.

The average money-market fund’s seven-day yield is 0.05%.

As for high-yield checking accounts, there are usually some requirements that need to be met: that you use direct deposit, paperless statements, or make a certain number of debt-card transactions, McBride said. For that, the average federally insured rate is 2.56%, according to Bankrate.com.

Schwab is also finding that many clients want more than just money-market funds to preserve cash.

Schwab Bank, a subsidiary of Charles Schwab Corp.

/quotes/zigman/240465/quotes/nls/schw SCHW
-3.23%

 , has a high-yield investor checking account and high-yield investor savings offering that clients use as a cash alternative, and are linked to their Schwab account, said Jeff Morley, who heads up Schwab’s team of portfolio consultants.
See more on Schwab’s high-yield checking account.

The checking account yields 0.25% and the savings account yields about 0.4%.

/quotes/zigman/240465/quotes/nls/schw

Add SCHW to portfolio

SCHW

Charles Schwab Corp.

$
15.60

-0.52
-3.23%

Volume: 39.57M
July 8, 2011 4:00p

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4 days ago

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — This year’s nationally scrutinized battle in New York over whether to legalize gay marriage has attracted big money.

One longtime Albany lobbyist describes it as a “limitless” amount of lobbying dollars and campaign contributions from gay marriage advocates.

Susan Lerner of the good-government group Common Cause says she hasn’t seen anything like the spending over gay marriage since the abortion fights of the 1970s.

Both sides have had commitments of over a million dollars, mostly from national advocates for their position.

A vote could come as soon as Wednesday and is seen as a critical moment in the national movement for gay marriage rights.

Copyright © 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.