Last week in our story "Lehman Bros Terminating Offshore Money Fund; Q3 Worldwide Flows," we mentioned that the Investment Company Institute and the International Investment Funds Association recently released their latest survey of "Worldwide Mutual Fund Assets and Flows Third Quarter 2008." Today, we take a closer look at the largest markets for money market mutual funds worldwide. Crane Data took the raw ICI statistics and produced a ranking of countries based on money fund assets, which we summarize below.
The U.S. remained the largest market for money funds by far, with over 63% of the worldwide total of $5.446 trillion as of Sept. 30, 2008. The U.S. was also one of the few countries to asset assets increase in the third quarter of 2008, the quarter which included Reserve Primary Fund "breaking the buck". Assets increased by $39 billion, or 1.2%, to $3.44 trillion in Q3, and increased by $589 billion, or 20.6% over one year.
Ireland ranks second in assets with its huge concentration of "offshore" money market funds domiciled in Dublin. (Unlike other countries, Ireland doesn't break out its money fund assets from its total mutual fund assets, but almost the entirety of their total is money funds.) Ireland saw assets decrease sharply in Q3'08, falling $157.9 billion, or 16.0%, to $827.9 billion. These funds, many of which have U.S. counterparts and managers, suffered due to the lack of government and Treasury options to catch the institutional money temporarily fleeing prime money funds. Also, unlike U.S. money funds, they lacked the extensive safety net of U.S. Government support programs.
France ranks as the third largest money fund market with $668 billion (down $62 billion, or 8.5% in Q3), and Luxembourg, which includes many of JPMorgan's offshore funds, ranks fourth with $477 billion (down 7 billion, or 1.5%). These are followed by Australia ($199 billion, down 42 billion, or 17.3%), Italy ($90 billion, down 12 billion, or 11.4%), Canada ($68 billion), Korea ($54 billion), Spain ($52 billion), and Mexico ($45 billion).
To request the full XLS table, e-mail our statistics team at stork@cranedata.us and include "Worldwide XLS" in the Subject Line.
