Since the financial crisis of 2008, money market funds have been the subject of fierce debate. Regulators say money market funds need to be fundamentally transformed to prevent them from creating too much systemic risk. The fund industry has pushed back, trying to preserve the utility of money market funds for millions of investors. Fortunately, a smart compromise exists that would reform the riskiest money market funds while protecting retail investors.
Money market funds may seem an unlikely object of controversy because they take such a conservative investment approach. They must invest at least 97 percent of their assets in securities with the top credit rating and these securities must have an average maturity of 60 days or less.
Because money-market funds are usually very safe, they are allowed to calculate their share price in a special way. Stock and bond mutual funds calculate their share price — known as the “net asset value,” or NAV — based on the market prices of their investments at the end of the day. By contrast, money-market funds may maintain a fixed NAV at $1 per share, subject to the strict conditions mentioned above. In exchange for these conditions, investors can almost always buy and sell shares in money-market funds for $1 each, which is very convenient.
But this apparent stability can mask some volatility. For this reason, money-market funds must also calculate privately an actual market price for their shares on a regular basis, which reflects market prices. If this market price drops below $0.995 per share, the fund might be forced to “break the buck” — that is, reduce its reported NAV below $1.
That’s exactly what happened to one money-market fund during the financial crisis. In September 2008, the Reserve Primary Fund — a $60 billion money-market fund owned solely by large institutions — incurred losses on debt issued by Lehman Brothers. The fund was forced to reduce its NAV from $1 to 97 cents a share.
After the Reserve Primary Fund broke the buck, large investors became skittish about their holdings in other money-market funds and began withdrawing their money. Just as a bank run can destroy a bank that might have otherwise survived, this wave of redemptions forced another fund manager to close one of its money-market funds, even though that other fund didn’t own any toxic Lehman assets.
Regulators maintain that a fixed NAV makes money-market funds more vulnerable to runs like these. If investors perceive that a money-market fund’s investments have slightly decreased in value, the fixed NAV allows them to withdraw their investment with no losses — so long as they do so quickly, before the fund breaks the buck.
As a simple example, consider the Reserve Primary Fund’s large institutional investors in the days before Lehman Brothers failed. Because these large investors closely follow their investments, they knew that the fund had a position in debt issued by Lehman. As they saw Lehman coming closer to collapse (which caused the market price of its debt to decline), these investors suspected that the market value of the Reserve Primary Fund’s investments had decreased.
Loading...
Comments