Im Hinblick auf den gestrigen Artikel The Next Target: Asset Managers
The $3.4 trillion money-market fund industry is not going down the tubes. After the second money-market fund in 40 years to see its net asset value fall below $1 sparked a slew of redemptions from institutional holders, sparking fears of a money-market version of a “run on the banks,” the Treasury Department has stepped in.
The Treasury’s plan to provide insurance for holders of money-market funds may have “saved the money fund industry,” says Peter Crane, president and CEO of Crane Data, which tracks flows in the money-market fund industry. That’s not hyperbole: Putnam Investments Thursday announced the closure of a large institutional fund because of the swelling redemptions, brought on by the desire for investors to hoard cash. Were steps not taken, this would have continued.
In the long-term, most of these steps will probably not matter much, other than to provide
an extra layer of reassurance to investors. That’s particularly true for retail investors. Mr. Crane estimates that about $78 billion in funds were redeemed from money-market funds on Wednesday, and institutional holders accounted for all of that and more, saying that retail holdings in money funds actually increased slightly on Wednesday.
Part of that is the result of logistics. Don Phillips, managing director at Morningstar, notes that retail investors, unlike institutions, can’t click a button to shift funds. Unless an individual investor had more than one money-market fund account, he says,“you have to go find another one, download the paperwork and fill it out — you just couldn’t do it as quickly as these institutions could.”
Mr. Crane says that had this problem been allowed to fester through the weekend, retail redemptions would likely have picked up next week. He didn’t have exact figures for Thursday’s activity, but estimates about $100 billion in funds — again, mostly institutional — were redeemed Thursday, and more redemptions are likely Friday, though at a lower level.
“The money funds could have taken a couple of more days of redemptions on that scale, but that would have caused a couple more of the smaller players to fall by the wayside,” he says. “Had we gotten into next week, some of the larger, more conservative firms would have been showing significant cracks.
blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2008/09/19/...for-money-market-funds/