The Greek Letter for 'Sour Grapes'

As anyone who has spent time working in the financial industry knows, conversations with people outside of it can be tricky. Sports, religion, politics, the weather -- sure, all that's fine. But start talking shop and the eyes glaze over quickly, especially if you sprinkle in Greek letters like alpha, theta and gamma.

There is, however, one piece of Greek-lettered financial jargon that the off-Wall Street crowd may want to acquaint themselves with: It's called "deposit beta" and it's actually a pretty easy concept to understand. Deposit beta refers to how much the interest rate on bank accounts will change when broader market rates move. And as even those among us with the glazed-over eyes probably know by now, there's likely a very important Federal Reserve interest-rate increase looming on the horizon.

So if the Fed increases rates by 25 basis points, or a quarter of a percentage point, a deposit beta of 100 percent would mean that the rate on your savings account also goes up 25 basis points. Is that likely to happen? Ha, yeah right.

Here are what analysts at Goldman Sachs estimate the deposit betas will be for a handful of U.S. banks:

One of the biggest causes of sour grapes among critics of the Fed's near-zero interest rate policy has been that savers have been punished. And that punishment is unlikely to end right away. The best guess seems to be that it may take more than one or two rate increases for customers to benefit from deposit betas as high as those above, so the initial liftoff may be more alluring for bank shareholders than savers. When it comes to money market funds, forget it. Many of them have been waiving management fees to keep paying positive interest rates, so they are likely to have no -- or very low -- deposit betas until rates rise enough that they can start collecting fees again.