Vikas Bajaj reports:
Money market funds, the short-term cash alternatives, grew to $2.9 trillion in June, up from $2.1 trillion a year ago, according to Crane Data. Those funds, in turn, have more than tripled their holdings of Treasuries and other government debt while reducing the share of their portfolios invested in somewhat riskier corporate notes.
Money-market funds have gone up by eight hundred billion dollars over the past year? Yikes. To put this in perspective, the total amount of Treasury bills outstanding, according to the most recent schedule of Federal debt, is $1.13 trillion. If the money-market funds are massively overweight Treasury bills, there can’t be very many left over for anybody else.