While overall mutual fund assets declined in July, money market mutual funds continued to be the bright spot in the fund business. Money fund assets increased by $85.1 billion, or 2.5%, in July to a record $3.487 trillion, according to the Investment Company Institute's monthly "Trends in Mutual Fund Investing". Taxable money funds rose 2.8% to $2.986 trillion while Tax-Free funds rose 0.5% to $496.6 billion. Year-to-date through July 31, money fund assets increased by $380.2 billion, or 12.2%, while total mutual fund assets declined by $433.3 billion, or 3.6%.
In ICI's latest (separate) weekly series, money fund assets decreased by $625 million to $3.573 trillion in the week ended August 27. Month-to-date in August, money funds have increased by about $44 billion. They remain just below their record level of $3.575 trillion, set two weeks ago. Year-to-date figures through this week show money funds up by $428 billion, or 13.6%, and over 52 weeks funds have increased by a whopping $810 billion, or 29.3%.
ICI also released its "Month-End Portfolio Holdings of Taxable Money Market Funds," which shows big increases in Commercial Paper (up $36.8 billion, or 5.2%, to $751.2 billion), U.S. Government Agency Securities (up $28.3 billion, or 7.5%, to $405.1 billion), U.S. Treasury Bills (up $12.7 billion, or 6.0%, to $225.4 billion), and Bank Notes (up $10.8 billion, or 11.3%, to $106.9 billion). Declines were seen in Corporate Notes (down $14.3 billion, or 4.7%, to $290.4 billion), Other Treasury Securities (down $3.36 billion, or 5.6%, to $56.8 billion), and Repo (down $808 million, or 0.2%, to $535.8 billion). Corporate notes likely declined partially due the final runoff of a number of SIV-related medium-term notes (MTNs) during July.
CP remains the largest percentage of money fund holdings, representing 25.1% of assets. (ABCP makes up 43.5% of total CP, according to the latest Federal Reserve figures.) Repo is second with 17.9%, Agencies are third with 13.6%, and CD are fourth with 10.6%. Corporate notes (9.7%), T-Bills (7.5%), Other (4.9%), Eurodollar CDs (5.0%), Bank Notes (3.6%), Other Treasury Securities (1.9%), and Banker's Acceptances (0.1%) round out the totals as of July 31, 2008.
