Despite the best efforts of the Treasury Department, investors remain less than confident that all the unprecedented government intervention will get the economy moving any time soon.

Just take a look at the market for U.S. Treasury bills.

The movements of two heavily traded Treasury securities tell the story. The 2-year Treasury note fell Thursday to a yield below 1%. Bond yields fall as the prices and demand for bonds rise.

That means investors are essentially willing to get almost no return at all on their investments, rather than face losing all or part of their investments, either in the stock markets or in riskier corporate and junk bond markets.

Treasury bonds are considered by Wall Street as a relatively safe investment because of their backing by the “full faith and credit” of the U.S. government, and usually carry a much lower yield, or return, then corporate or junk bonds.

“What you’re seeing here is extreme hoarding of cash -- mattress trading,” said Thomas DiGigaloma, chief U.S. fixed income strategist with Jefferies & Co. “All that money that used to go into money market funds is going straight into the bills market. Investors don’t trust the system and just want their capital back.”

Consider that the yield on the three-month T-bill was around 0.015% on Thursday. With a yield that small, if an investor put $1 million into three-month T-bills today, they would earn just $37.50 when they matured.

Treasury bills are often used by investors to temporarily “park” their money while they look for better opportunities. Because no better opportunities have existed for a while, investors have kept their money parked in Treasury bills, pushing their yield down to almost nothing.

While the three-month T-bill isn’t trading at a negative yield -- as it was when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and a prominent money market firm liquidated several of its funds -- the bill is way off its historic norms. In comparison, for most of the summer the yield on a three-month T-bill was around 1.6%.

Bond investors and fixed income strategists said Treasuries are going remain at these distressed levels until the stock market returns to normalcy and investors have a better idea where the economy is headed.

“There’s a sense in the market versus a couple months ago that things have stabilized in the credit markets, but things haven’t returned to normal,” said Mike Pond, chief fixed income strategist with Barclays Capital. “Until things return to normal, bonds are going remain at these levels.”

One bond investor called the demand for short-term investments virtually a stampede.

“You can’t even get the bond from the Treasury -- they’re that much in demand,” said Craig Brothers, portfolio manager with Bel-Air Investment Advisers, who manages $2 billion in bonds and other fixed-income investments.

Investors said that signs that the credit markets are repairing will come when Treasuries stop trading at these record-high prices.

Investors “could come out quickly … as risk markets improve,” said George Goncalves, chief Treasury strategist with Morgan Stanley.