Oh my. If I could answer that question with certainty, we could all get rich.

I don't know, but the way we're piling on debt, rates have to be going up before they come down. Deposits are just another source of money and if the foreign buyers of our Treasury debt withdraw some of their funding, the effect will be to drive the "price" (rates) of all debt of similar maturities upwards as all borrowers compete with the Treasury to obtain the funds.

The Treasury can forestall such rate increases by increasing the money supply (printing money), but that strategy will only result in inflation, which will also tend to drive rates upwards.

What I'm saying is that cash (CD's) are not a bad place to be these days. I just wouldn't buy CD's with really long maturities, so when rates start to climb you can cash in your CD's and jump on the bandwagon of increasing rates. Watch the chart of the yield curve published in the Wall Street Journal or Investor's Business Daily. Here's the curve from today, as published by Bloomberg.com http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/rates/index.html That will tell you what the market thinks will happen to rates over various maturities.

I began reducing my exposure to equities in favor of cash and high-yielding bonds well more than a year ago. It worked pretty well for me to temper the results of the stock market downturn. I'm still staying where I've been and haven't jumped back on the stock market bandwagon yet. I don't think the weak economic news is over quite yet.

But again, if I could answer the question of when the bottom of the stock market really occurred--that's different from the bottom of the economic cycle, of course--we could all get doubly rich.