Exactly. We're getting a tremendous ... benefit, of a sort, by being the least worst place to put your money.

I worked for a muni-focused Wall St. firm shortly after the crash of 2008, during some of the peak flight to quality years in recent memory. My sole comfort about the ridiculous risk and crash that happened in the US was that somehow the interconnected system brought down the whole world as well (ex: the German landesbanks and bundesbanks). I say comfort, but I mean it's hard to put a label on such a conception.

Credit union. Or, literally any bank that doesn't gamble with the money you give to it. This is much harder to find since the corporate lobbyists gutted Glass-Steagall, but they still exist.

Don't credit unions still use your deposit as backing for mortgages, auto loans, etc? A run could still happen on a credit union.

My credit union has loaned me money, so they were in fact gambling that I would pay it back.

This isn't for your spare change, if you need to stash billions of dollars you're not walking down to the local credit union and signing up for an account.

Yes but Glass-Steagall kind of principles are the ones that are continually being lobbied and chipped away at to increase the capacity for risk in the financial markets.

See: Trying to treat municipal bonds as high quality liquid assets (vs. illiquid for holding purposes).

I would assume that credit unions are a high default risk than the treasury.

Investment is just a nice word for gambling; there's always risk.

I agree that there are required levels of prudence in banking and investment management more generally, but don't pretend there's a well-defined brightline between "gambling", "speculation" and "investment".

developed or developing?

Developing is a risky bet. Commodities are down across the board and most of these developing nations depend on them for revenue.

Also the bonds either has to be in USD or you could get screwed due to the strength of the dollar.

FYI bank deposits are insured by the FDIC up to 250k.