Crane Data published its latest Weekly Money Fund Portfolio Holdings statistics Wednesday, which track a shifting subset of our monthly Portfolio Holdings collection. The most recent cut (with data as of May 30) includes Holdings information from 47 money funds (down 22 from a week ago), or $2.913 trillion (down from $3.904 trillion) of the $7.400 trillion in total money fund assets (or 39.4%) tracked by Crane Data. (Note: Our Weekly MFPH are e-mail only and aren't available on the website. See our latest Monthly Money Fund Portfolio Holdings here and our May 12 News, "May Money Fund Portfolio Holdings: FICC Repo Hits $1T, T-Bills Drop.")
Our latest Weekly MFPH Composition summary shows Government assets dominating the holdings list with Treasuries totaling $1.316 trillion (down from $1.728 trillion a week ago), or 45.2%; Repurchase Agreements (Repo) totaling $1.076 trillion (down from $1.411 trillion a week ago), or 36.9%, and Govern-ment Agency securities totaling $275.3 billion (down from $334.9 billion), or 9.4%. Commercial Paper (CP) totaled $116.1 billion (down from a week ago at $182.7 billion), or 4.0%. Certificates of Deposit (CDs) totaled $51.5 billion (down from $95.9 billion a week ago), or 1.8%. The Other category accounted for $44.6 billion or 1.5%, while VRDNs accounted for $33.8 billion, or 1.2%.
The Ten Largest Issuers in our Weekly Holdings product include: the US Treasury with $1.316 trillion (45.2% of total holdings), Fixed Income Clearing Corp with $321.1B (11.0%), the Federal Home Loan Bank with $178.7 billion (6.1%), JP Morgan with $100.4B (3.4%), RBC with $75.0B (2.6%), BNP Paribas with $70.2B (2.4%), Citi with $66.6B (2.3%), Federal Farm Credit Bank with $65.5B (2.2%), the Federal Reserve Bank of New York with $60.9B (2.1%) and Bank of America with $41.2B (1.4%).
The Ten Largest Funds tracked in our latest Weekly include: JPMorgan US Govt MM ($281.7B), JPMorgan 100% US Treas MMkt ($255.1B), Goldman Sachs FS Govt ($249.1B), Fidelity Inv MM: Govt Port ($232.4B), Morgan Stanley Inst Liq Govt ($166.4B), State Street Inst US Govt ($156.0B), Fidelity Inv MM: MM Port ($152.6B), Dreyfus Govt Cash Mgmt ($123.9B), Allspring Govt MM ($117.2B) and First American Govt Oblg ($108.6B). (Let us know if you'd like to see our latest domestic U.S. and/or "offshore" Weekly Portfolio Holdings collection and summary.)
In other news, the BIS, or Bank for International Settlements, published a paper titled, "Stablecoins and safe asset prices." The Abstract says, "This paper examines the impact of dollar-backed stablecoin flows on short term US Treasury yields using daily data from 2021 to 2025. Estimates from instrumented local projection regressions suggest that a 2-standard deviation inflow into stablecoins lowers 3-month Treasury yields by 2-2.5 basis points within 10 days, with limited to no spillover effects on longer tenors. We also find evidence of asymmetric effects: stablecoin outflows raise yields by two to three times as much as inflows lower them. Decomposing the yield impact by issuer shows that USDT (Tether) has the largest contribution followed by USDC (Circle), consistent with their relative size. Our results highlight stablecoins' growing footprint in safe asset markets, with implications for monetary policy transmission, stablecoin reserve transparency, and financial stability."
The BIS writes, "Dollar-backed stablecoins have seen remarkable growth and are poised to reshape financial markets. As of March 2025, the combined assets under management of these cryptocurrencies promising par convertibility to the US dollar and backed by dollar-denominated assets exceeded $200 billion, surpassing the short-term US securities holdings of major foreign investors like China.... Stablecoin issuers, notably Tether (USDT) and Circle (USDC), back their tokens primarily with US Treasury bills (T-bills) and money market instruments, positioning them as significant players in short term debt markets. Indeed, dollar-backed stablecoins purchased nearly $40B of US T-bills in 2024, similar to the largest US government money market funds and larger than most foreign purchases.... While prior research focuses on stablecoins' role in cryptocurrency volatility (Griffin and Shams, 2020), their impact on commercial paper markets (Barthelemy et al., 2023) or their systemic risks (Bullmann et al., 2019), their interaction with traditional safe asset markets remains underexplored."
They explain, "This paper investigates whether stablecoin flows exert measurable demand pressures on US Treasury yields. We document two key findings. First, stablecoin flows compress short-term T-bill yields, with effects comparable to that of small-scale quantitative easing on long-term yields. In our most stringent specification, which aims to overcome endogeneity concerns by using a series of crypto shocks that affect stablecoin flows but not Treasury yields directly, we find that 5-day stablecoin inflows of $3.5B, or 2 standard deviations, lower 3-month T-bill yields by about 2-2.5 basis points (bps) within 10 days. Second, we decompose yield impacts into issuer-specific contributions to find that USDT has the largest contribution to T-bill yield compression, followed by USDC. We discuss the policy implications of our findings for monetary policy transmission, stablecoin reserve transparency, and financial stability."
The piece continues, "Our empirical analysis is based on daily data from January 2021 to March 2025. To construct a measure of stablecoin flows, we collect market capitalization data for the six largest dollar-backed stablecoins and aggregate them into a single number. We then use 5-day changes in aggregate stablecoin market capitalization as our proxy for inflows into stablecoins. We collect data on the US Treasury yield curve, as well as data on cryptocurrency prices (Bitcoin and Ether). We choose the 3-month Treasury bill yield as our outcome variable of interest as the largest stablecoins have either disclosed or publicly stated this tenor as their preferred habitat."
It concludes, "Stablecoins have already established themselves as significant players in Treasury markets, with measurable and significant effects on short-term yields. Their growth blurs the lines between cryptocurrency and traditional finance, demanding regulatory attention to reserve practices, potential implication for monetary policy transmission and financial stability risks. Future research could explore cross-border spillovers and interactions with money market funds, particularly during liquidity crises."
Another piece, "Stablecoins And The Banking System: Opportunity Or Threat?" tells us, "[C]rypto currencies may dominate the financial news today, but it is stablecoins that are subtly on track to transform banking. Stablecoins are simply the digital version of the cash in your wallet. Like cash, they don't earn interest, and they are pegged one-to-one to a currency, like a dollar. They have major advantages -- efficiency, accessibility, transparency, and security -- and can be exchanged back into your currency."
It states, "[M]ost people would be surprised to learn how indispensable stablecoins have become: The total value of stablecoins linked to the dollar has grown to $221 billion, with the average supply of stablecoins overall growing 28% per year. Tether, the world's largest stablecoin issuer, reported a net profit of $13 billion last year with just 80 employees. On their own, stablecoins would already be a top 20 U.S. bank." See also Bloomberg's "Stablecoin Regulation Could Shakeup US Financial System."
