Fidelity Money Markets on Fed, Flows
Fidelity Investments published a Money Markets brief, entitled, "Fed Likely to Remain on Hold in 2020." While mostly on general economic issues, the piece does have a couple of mentions of interest to money market funds. Author Kerry Pope comments, "While the Fed does not consider open market operations and bill buying to be quantitative easing, the impact of the $414 billion increase in the Fed's balance sheet in such a short period of time has been to suppress money market rates and volatility. Indeed, year-end funding pressures were muted due to the abundant liquidity in the system, which resulted in 45 counterparties using the Fed's overnight reverse repo facility for a total of $64.1 billion, a much lower amount than in years past.... Significant growth in repo agreements sponsored by the Fixed Income Clearing Corporation (FICC) has also been credited with suppressing year-end rate volatility. The year-end growth highlights the balance sheet-friendly flexibility the program offers to absorb funding needs (given that the repos move onto the FICC balance sheet). For money market funds (MMFs) with access to sponsored repo, FICC has become an important source of supply at a competitive rate. While most MMFs engage in sponsored repo with the three largest custodians, there are now a total of 12 approved sponsors suggesting further FICC-sponsored repo growth in the months ahead." Fidelity adds, "Assets into money market funds have been robust in the years following money market reform. In 2019 alone, assets under management in institutional and retail funds rose by $593 billion to end the year at more than $3.4 trillion.... Retail investors have turned to money market funds to counter elevated valuations and heightened equity and bond market volatility. On the institutional side, fund flows have benefited from tax law changes allowing the corporate repatriation of cash at favorable rates. Institutional investors with strategic liquidity have started to make greater use of prime MMFs in an effort to benefit from higher yields in comparison to government funds."
