Following the stock market’s incredible collapse in March and subsequent recovery, my inbox has been inundated with emails from readers writing to tell me that they are now 90% to even 100% in cash.

These emails come from people young and old, rich and poor, optimistic in their tone and pessimistic in tone. Some include racist, conspiratorial rants as part of their justification. Others are more rational.

I am not 100% in cash or even close. I maintain a healthy portfolio of major pharmaceutical stocks and biotechs. I own major technology stocks that I have no intention of selling. But, outside of those sectors, my only exposure to equities is through Berkshire Hathaway.

Stock markets today are dramatically overvalued. The S&P is trading at a trailing P/E of 20x. While trailing earnings or even current earnings are not the only way to value a stock or an index, the other mechanisms take into account earnings growth and leverage. Earnings will be down dramatically across the board in 2020 and probably into 2021, and the market is highly leveraged. Therefore, there simply is no more favorable metric than the P/E ratio right now.

The problem with savings and money market accounts as a place to hang out is clear. The longer that the Federal Reserve maintains the target Fed funds rate at zero to 0.25% (or lower), the more likely we are to see savings rates fall. Over the last two weeks, virtually every major online bank lowered its savings rates by 20 basis points and it is increasingly difficult to get more than 1.30% on your savings.

Some have suggested that the outcome of the COVID-19 crisis will be a prolonged period of deflation in the US. If we do enter a period of deflation, cash could be the single best asset to hold since it will maintain its real value ($1 tomorrow will be worth more than $1 today and commercial banking will never take your money and give you back less).

I personally do not see asset deflation in an era where the Federal government will be unable to have a balanced budget and where leverage rates are likely to need to remain very high throughout the public and private sectors.

In an environment where prices are increasing by more than what you are earning in a savings account, maintaining your money in savings accounts may not be a reliable intermediate or long-term strategy for maintaining value and purchasing power.

Savings accounts are calming and are a great place to hang out for short periods of time when the economy is going through a massive transformation. The ability to earn a higher rate of return and maintain complete liquidity makes online savings accounts particularly interesting during this period. But, people need to think a little more creatively about maintaining the real value of their money and that may involve investing in commodities such as gold, real estate, some equities and short or long term CDs.

I had been a customer of Smith Barney for as long as I can remember, even after it merged into Morgan Stanley in 2011.

Smith Barney was always an outstanding institution to do business with. They understood that the client always came first and went above and beyond to accommodate. This remained true when Smith Barney was under the ownership of Citibank. Smith Barney was the kind of financial partner that you wanted to have forever, and remained helpful to their customers even as their equity trading business trickled away to the online brokers in the end of the last decade and beginning of this one.

When Morgan Stanley came along in 2011, there was little reason to leave initially. The structure of the program remained as it was and the people remained the same.

In the years that followed, however, the business became about selling customers esoteric structured notes, since these instruments were really the only product that Morgan Stanley could offer that weren’t available to online brokers. Structured notes would prove to be highly profitable to Morgan Stanley with the initial sale resulting in a 3 ½ commission to the broker. But, these notes – which could be debt-based or equity-based – would almost always prove to be lousy, illiquid and a tax disaster for customers.

The tradeoff for customers became clear – if you buy structured notes, maybe Morgan Stanley would get you into that great IPO into which neither Schwab nor TD Ameritrade could provide access to.

Then, when the IPOs dried up, many customers stuck around for all of the small benefits that being a Morgan Stanley customer provided. Now, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Morgan Stanley took to stripping those away. When I, as a customer, suggested that it was an unfortunate time to be stripping benefits, my financial advisor could provide little help.

Adding still more fire to the pit, when I went to transfer my account from Morgan Stanley, they hit me with $265 in outbound account transfer fees. I surveyed my contacts at other full service brokerages who told me that these fees are not viewed as standard in the industry or appropriate. Although I have been promised a call back from Morgan Stanley with an explanation of the fees, one never came even though I had been a client for decades.

Bottom line: The COVID-19 crisis has brought out the best and the worst in people, and in companies.

The Federal Reserve has held the Fed Funds target rate constant at zero to 25 basis points today. Chair Jerome Powell indicated that the ongoing COVID-19 public health crisis has weighed heavily on the economic condition of the country. Inflation remains an overriding concern to extraordinarily low interest rates, but is very muted as a result of the economic slowdown and does not present a concern. The Federal Reserve also indicated that it remains prepared to use tremendous tools in the interim as it sees fit in order to maintain liquidity, including using its balance sheet to purchase treasury and agency mortgage-back securities. It is also employing lending powers to an unprecedented extent through a “mainstreet facility” to make credit available where such credit may be necessary to avoid or reduce household suffering (with the understanding that the Federal Reserve has lending powers but may not make grants or extend loans that it does not expect to see repaid).

The Fed’s statement indicates an intention to maintain rates here until it is confident that the economy has weathered COVID-19. The statement does not introduce the possibility of a move into a negative Fed Funds rate as was advocated last week by Narayana Kocherlochota, the former Chair of the Minneapolis Fed. Importantly, the Fed’s statement does not commit to maintaining low interest rates until unemployment returns to 2019 levels.

The Fed refrained from stating that it believes that the economy will recover nicely in 2021 after COVID-19 is behind us. Powell recognizes that there is uncertainty around the virus and that the virus is going to dictate the length and depth of this depression. We will obviously see significant declines in economic activity and significant increases in unemployment in the near term, but POwell and the Fed are unable to provide guidance for the intermediate and longer term.