Reuters writes, "China stock investors seek haven in bond, money market funds." The article says, "China's recent stock market rout has further damped risk appetite of mainland investors, who have been seeking safe haven in bond and money market funds, and stepping up overseas investment amid yuan depreciation fears, latest data shows. Over the past week, outstanding margin loans slumped 7 percent as investors unwound 78.1 billion yuan ($11.87 billion) worth of leveraged bets, according to data from state-margin lender China Securities Finance Corp. Latest monthly fund data shows investors are shifting money out of stocks into money market and bond funds. In December, assets in money market funds jumped 27.6 percent from a month earlier to 4.4 trillion yuan, while bond funds expanded 21.6 percent in size." In other new, the U.S. Treasury's Office of Financial Research released the paper, "The US Bilateral Repo Market: Lessons for a New Survey." It reads, "We provide aggregate statistics on U.S. dealers' bilateral repurchase agreements and economically equivalent securities lending activities The data were collected from the U.S.-affiliated securities dealers of nine bank holding companies under a voluntary pilot program run by the Office of Financial Research (OFR) and the Federal Reserve System with input from the Securities and Exchange Commission. We found that the majority of this activity involves the delivery or receipt of U.S. Treasuries, with equities a distant second. The most common maturity is one day. Finally, rates are widely dispersed across asset classes." Under "Lessons Learned," it says, "In addition to collecting valuable quantitative information on bilateral activity in the U.S. securities financing market, the pilot was successful in identifying specific challenges of collecting this type of market data, including these three: (1) Limited scope of the pilot data collection, (2) Lack of data standards, (3) Separate data systems."
