Depends on where you're saving I suppose. Risk and Demand drive interest rates. Traditionally things like CDs and city/government bonds have had the lowest interest rates because they are extremely safe investments. When you start getting into stocks and hedge funds etc the risks go up quite a bit, because those people need money too and they have to offer higher returns to get enough people to risk their money with them.
I bank at a credit union, and as such I have some CDs as well as money in my sharedraft. (sharedraft is the credit unions' way of getting around a rule somewhere that says you can't draw interest on a checking account - they basically let your money sit in a savings account, drawing interest, and anytime you cut a check or debit card, it causes an ovedraft, the bank auto transfers money from savings to cover it, and you don't get an overdraft fee)
Interest rates on the savings account though are very low. My CDs get a good deal more interest. I don't care to mess with investing in much of anything else requiring more of my attention.
As for the low interest rates you are musing over, we get to supply and demand. In today's "panic the sheep" economy, a LOT more people are saving now than they were before. Not because they want to specifically, but that they are just cutting back on their spending which results in savings. More people saving causes supply of savers to go up. This drives interest rates down, because the banks don't have to offer so much interest to get the number of savers they need to borrow money from. (supply goes up, demand remains constant, drives prices down) If the economy were truly bad, there wouldn't be enough people that had money to save in the first place, and we'd see higher interest rates. So, in a truly bad economy you have good rates. But in an artificial panic economy, you have low rates like now.
If you think about it, the purpose of getting interest on savings is to prevent your assets from devaluating in the bank. In other words, when a dollar buys a loaf of bread, you put a dollar in the bank. In five years, that bread costs $1.20, and you look in the bank and you now have at least $1.20, 20 cents of that from interest. At least that's the idea anyway. Savings was never meant as a way to make money. That's what more risky things like stocks are for, making money on your good judgement, or good luck.
Somewhat off-topic, that's always bugged me in the past with stamps. I buy a stamp, that will mail a letter. A year later the post office decides to raise rates. OK that makes sense. But what about that book of stamps I bought that I still have a bunch of? They devaluated. They didn't say "this mails a letter", they say "you paid 35 cents for this". (when?) Now I need a stamp plus a little more to get the same service. Technically when that happened the post office profited off me as a result of inflation because in the end I already paid (in today's terms) 42 cents a year ago, and now I have to chip in another 3 cents, that's profit for the post office for me to end up paying 45 cents (in today's money) to get 42 cents of today's service. Thankfully now we have the "F" stamp because enough people screamed.
