Rindert Kiemel Jr. was shopping for the best rates on certificates of deposit recently when he noticed Milwaukee's Park Bank was offering a CD with a special nine-month maturity and a 2.5% yield.

He called the Journal Sentinel to ask about the reputation of Park Bank because he hadn't found any rate as good, and he wanted to make sure his money would be safe there.

"It was the highest I saw unless you want to tie it up longer," said Kiemel, a Madison resident.

Although he didn't need to worry about Park Bank -- it's profitable, its strength is listed as excellent by the bank-rating firm Bauer Financial Inc., and its deposits are insured -- the fact that a nine-month CD with a 2.5% yield was the most appealing option says something about the current returns for conservative savers who like the safety, certainty and simplicity of CDs.

That is: Yields are way down and probably won't increase much until the economy turns around.

"We are at or near record lows across the range of maturities on CDs and savings accounts," said Greg McBride, senior financial analyst for Bankrate.com. "Yields continue to decline, although at a more modest pace than that seen since the end of 2008 and the early part of this year. Even once the yield bottoms, it will likely be some period of time before we see a significant rebound."

As Kiemel found, it is increasingly difficult to locate a CD with a maturity of one year or less with the number "2" in it, unless the 2 is on the right side of the decimal point.

The current average annual percentage yield on a one-year CD is a scrawny 1.66% in Wisconsin, which is down from 2.53% a year ago and 4.39% at this time in 2007, according to Datatrac Corp. And there is not much reward in going to longer maturities. The Wisconsin averages on $10,000 CDs of two, three, four and five years, respectively, are 1.96%, 2.21%, 2.42% and 2.61%.

Fed rate cuts

Interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve to help stimulate the economy are the key driver of today's low yields on CDs and bank money market accounts.

"It's an unfortunate reality that any time the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates, it amounts to a direct subsidy from the pockets of savers and retirees into the pockets of borrowers," McBride said.

But there are some other factors at work as the nation struggles to recover from the worst recession since the Great Depression: Nervous consumers are saving more and borrowing less. The U.S. personal savings rate was 4.2% in March of this year after hovering near or below 1% most months from roughly 2005 until the financial crisis took hold last fall.