Breaking the Buck
Bloomberg reports that a money market fund has broken the buck due to the Lehman mess.
I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it here, but one of my trailing indicators for how bad the mortgage/wall st./financial industry crapfest was if money market funds start breaking the buck. This is not one of those indicators that’s useful for further action, it’s one where if we pass this point, we really just need to hold on and ride it out. And it’s just happened to one fund which was holding 785 million of Lehman Brothers notes. Presumably, since they were leveraged out 20 or 30 or 40 times, there’s another bunch of billions of Lehman Brothers commercial paper out there.
I’d now like to request that I get 5 points back which where deducted from my engineering economics final back in college (1994 maybe?). There was a question where my answer was marked incorrect because I asserted that there were risks involved in investing in money market funds. I had noted that they were small, but that they existed, and the professor disagreed.
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