Like Bill Murray’s weatherman, who was forced to live the exact same day in “Groundhog Day” until love came along and gave him a fresh start, the certificate of deposit market seems to be looping around the same weekly reel.

The only difference from the movie? There doesn’t seem to be enough love from banks to save CD investors looking for a fresh start of their own. 

So here we go again. Bank CD rates, as measured by BankingMyWay’s National CD Rate Tracker, continue to bump along listlessly, with some downward drift from shorter-term certificates and some more water-treading among longer-term CD’s.

For the week, CD rates for three- and six-month CDs fell by about 10 basis points; to 0.46% from 0.56% for three-month issues; and to 0.82% from 0.83% for six-month certificates.

Higher up the interest rate chain, one-year CDs inched up to 1.15% from 1.14%; while two-year CDs hovered around 1.57% on a week-to-week basis. Four-year and five-year CDs also stayed even for the week, at 2.05% and 2.24%, respectively.

Along the ladder, most of the better rates seem to once again be coming from the ranks of small banks and online financial institutions. It’s possible, for example, to find a one-year CD with a 2.25% yield, but the deals are becoming fewer and farther apart than the ones investors saw earlier in 2009.

With interest rates pretty much the same, that means CDs are still hovering at record lows, with little concrete evidence that the market bottom has been reached and an upward climb is imminent.

That scenario has left many gurus scratching their egg-shaped heads. Economists are flummoxed that their early 2009 predictions of higher interest rates across the board – on bank products, auto loans and mortgages – haven’t panned out. Around $1 trillion in stimulus spending was supposed to have ignited a significant rally in the bond market, as inflation was supposed to have reared its ugly head, and the Federal Reserve would have hiked interest rates to counter-balance the end of a low-rate, low-inflation period for the financial markets.

Didn’t happen.

Depending on whom you talk to politically, the stimulus has either saved the economy from a depression or has had all the impact of a five-year-old boy’s popgun. What it surely hasn’t done is trigger that upward reset in interest rates that economists had anticipated.

The one potential piece of good news this week is a report from leading Federal Reserve officials that the Fed will stop buying up U.S. Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities (most likely by September). Through that program, initiated in early 2009, the Fed had spent tens of billions of dollars buying up bonds and mortgage securities that few investors wanted. That strategy kept interest rates artificially low and set the stage for lower rates for things like cars and new homes in early 2009.

CDs got caught up in the Fed buying spree, as rates fell on bank deposit products, too.  With interest rates at record lows, and money and credit historically cheap, banks saw no need to hike interest rates to raise money – not when Uncle Sam was tossing dollars around like a sailor on shore leave.

But with the Fed halting its buyback program, interest rates could finally begin to rise sometime in late September or in October.

It’s not much to hang your hat on, but for CD investors, hope from the Fed for higher rates is all they have right now.

Otherwise, it’s back to Groundhog Day, and that same low-yield story over and over again.

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