{"id":194471,"date":"2008-09-20T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-09-20T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/09\/20\/economics-update-374\/"},"modified":"2008-09-20T18:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-09-20T23:00:00","slug":"economics-update-374","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/09\/20\/economics-update-374\/","title":{"rendered":"Economics Update"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you think that this crisis is over, it’s not even close, as evidenced by the fact that <\/span>40% of US money market funds posted no returns yesterday<\/a>:<\/p>\n

More than 40 percent of U.S. taxable money market mutual funds posted zero return Thursday amid persistent turmoil in the credit markets, fund tracker Lipper said Friday.<\/p>\n

Lipper said 560 of the 1,263 classes of taxable money funds it tracks earned no return Thursday. This compared with 73 classes that posted zero return Wednesday and 63 Tuesday.<\/p>\n

A lot of taxable money mutual funds “put up big fat zeros yesterday,” said Jeff Tjornehoj, senior research analyst at Lipper in Denver. “This is unprecedented in recent history.” <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Expect to see the phrase, “unprecedented in recent history<\/span>,” a lot<\/span> in the next few months.<\/p>\n

Part of this was no doubt the rather large gyrations in US T-Bills over the past few days<\/a>, which went almost to 0% a on Thursday, because people were so concerned about finding safe havens. The 3 month T-Bill was at 0.22% Thursday, before heading back up to 0.91% on Friday following announcement of various rescue plans for the financial markets.<\/p>\n

The dollar rose in response to the bailouts too<\/a>, as did oil<\/a>, though gasoline is down for the 3rd straight day<\/a>, as that market adjusts to the realities of Hurricane Ike.<\/p>\n

That being said, even with the rescue packages, Moody’s is still looking at cutting its ratings on monoliner insurers Ambac and MBIA<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Also, it now looks like Morgan Stanley is still looking at merging with a commercial bank<\/a>, even if the news of the bailout plans may have helped.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you think that this crisis is over, it’s not even close, as evidenced by the fact that 40% of US money market funds posted no returns yesterday: More than 40 percent of U.S. taxable money market mutual funds posted zero return Thursday amid persistent turmoil in the credit markets, fund tracker Lipper said Friday. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1080,973,1135,1004,1045],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-194471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-currency","category-economy","category-energy","category-finance","category-insurance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194471"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}