Sunday, August 10, 2008

Money market mutual funds scale new high

Total assets in money-market mutual funds reached a record of nearly $3.5 trillion the week ending 8 Aug 2008, as the flight to safety. It was reported $14.5 billion was added to money-market funds for the week by Tuesday 5th Aug 2008. According to the report, since the credit mess began it was seen inflows almost every week.

Investors shifted $5.3 billion in cash away from prime institutional funds into municipal-bond funds, which are considered safer.

Government funds do not hold commercial paper, which is a short-term debt instrument for corporations that is considered riskier because it is not backed by collateral.

Investors also moved some cash from taxable funds into non-taxable funds as yields reached near-parity. Taxable yields have been dropping since the US Federal Reserve began slashing its interest-rate target in September 2007, and are now close to that current 2% level as of 10 August 2008.

Our view is that, US Federal Reserve will not be cutting rates going forward, in fact we have a view that US may in near term raise interest rate to curb rising inflation.

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