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Central Banks Have Swung From Frenetic Money Creation To The Monetary Death March

A weekend topic starting with 48 Hills. “If you were looking for an event that epitomizes the neoliberalization of the University of California, you’d be hard pressed to top the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies’ 2022 Lake Arrowhead Symposium. Despite being sponsored by a public institution, staged at a publicly owned venue, and funded in large part by public agencies (more about that below), the UCLA Lake Arrowhead Symposium is a decidedly private event. As at the mother of all such gatherings, the annual World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, attendance at the Symposium is by ‘invitation-only.'”

“Despite its prioritization of equity and diversity in awarding scholarships, the UCLA Lake Arrowhead Symposium is an exclusionary gathering—even more exclusionary than Davos. The World Economic Forum publicizes it proceedings—to be sure, in carefully curated podcasts and briefs. But at least WEF cites people who attend the event. No such citations emanate from the Symposium. I haven’t found a single news story that reported on its proceedings, much less cited anyone who was there. The neoliberal bias is evident from the lineup of speakers posted on the event’s home page.”

“Missing from this roster are any dissenters from the dominant, neoliberal paradigm. That’s a problem, because there’s a big difference between the World Economic Forum and Chatham House on the one hand and the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies on the other: The former are private institutions, the latter is a public one—and more importantly, a public institution officially dedicated to education. Genuine education involves debate, especially debate about conventional wisdom.”

The Los Angeles Times. “The Federal Reserve system was stung in late 2021 when it declared signs of emerging inflation to be ‘transitory’ and delayed taking strong action to tamp down price increases. The central bank has been running from its critics ever since. Under its chairman, Jerome H. Powell, it has instituted the most aggressive anti-inflation interest rate increases in more than 40 years as if to make up for its initially laggard response to what proved to be a nearly yearlong run-up in prices.”

“The Fed seems to have overlooked that the rate hikes would create a problem for banks completely different from the issues that brought the banking system to the brink of meltdown during the financial crisis of 2007-09. When venture investors advised their portfolio companies to pull their deposits out of SVB, the embedded losses became relevant. This is the situation that the Fed apparently overlooked. The Fed was fighting the last war, but not the existing war, in which the enemy was its own campaign of boosting interest rates (and thus crashing the values of long-term bonds) to fight inflation.”

From Money Wise. “With headline inflation figures coming down and a strong labor market, some say that the U.S. economy could be on its way back up. But billionaire investor Sam Zell does not share that optimism. ‘When you spread out free money for years at a time, you create significant drag, and I just don’t see how we are going to avoid a slowdown as that whole process comes to an end,’ he says. According to Zell, the problem lies with the U.S. Federal Reserve’s easy money policies. ‘I think the Fed screwed up by allowing zero interest rates to go on too long, I think we are just beginning to pay the price for that,’ Zell points out. ‘It would be nice to say that it would be great if the Fed got lucky. I’ve been around for 50 years and I’ve never seen the Fed get lucky.'”

From Newsweek. “A shift in tone from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has cast doubt over the federal government’s ability to respond to the recent banking crisis. Ross Gerber, a financial adviser and president of wealth and investment management firm Gerber Kawasaki tweeted: ‘Yellen trying to sooth markets… Didn’t really work. I don’t think people have any faith in Yellen and Powell at this point.'”

From Business Insider. “Prepare for stocks to crash and the American economy to suffer a sweeping downturn that rivals the Great Recession, Stephanie Pomboy has warned. ‘The everything bubble has now burst, and that’s going to hit everything, everywhere all at once,’ said the Macro Mavens founder. ‘There’s a lot of ugly stuff coming down the pike.’  The economist noted that debt levels are higher today than before the mid-2000s housing crash, and the Federal Reserve has dramatically raised interest rates over the past year. The upshot is that consumers are struggling to afford their car loans and credit cards, and many companies and real estate developers are feeling the squeeze, she continued.”

“‘This is really like 2007, 2008 all over again,’ Pomboy said. ‘Except I think it’s going to devolve even faster than it did then because of the speed and magnitude of the Fed’s rate hikes.’ Pomboy castigated the US central bank. She accused it of repeatedly pumping too much money into the economy, boosting asset prices to unsustainable highs, then ratcheting up interest rates and causing painful crashes. ‘The Fed basically has us ping-ponging from asset bubble to bust,’ she said. ‘It’s lather, rinse, repeat.'”

From Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. “Swiss regulators have tossed nitroglycerin onto the global financial fire. They have also committed shameless expropriation. So much for the safety of Zurich. The total wipe-out of $17bn of Credit Suisse’s tier 1 bonds renders the convertible debt market in Europe almost uninvestable. These junior bonds ought to trump equities in market hierarchy. Clearly they do not. ‘It means the banking crisis we’ve seen over the past few weeks has started a new chapter,’ said Russ Mould from AJ Bell.”

“You can date the moment that the small Greek crisis turned into the larger Italian and Spanish crisis, and therefore became an existential threat to Europe’s monetary union. It was when Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy – walking on the beach at Deauville in October 2010 – opened the door to haircuts on sovereign debt. Investors hurried to the exits, sauve qui peut. The justification for selling Credit Suisse at 7pc of book value and vaporising its bonds is that the bank is in worse trouble than supposed. Either Swiss regulators are exaggerating – in order to expropriate $17bn (3pc of Swiss GDP) – or global monetary tightening has already done widespread systemic damage.”

“We are now stuck in this brave new world. Central banks have swung from frenetic money creation in 2020-21 to the monetary death march of 2023, with all key measures of the money supply flashing red warnings in America and Europe. Central bankers have yet to acknowledge that the money supply is dangerously out of kilter. So brace for a long hot summer of financial accidents until they get the message.”

The Dallas Morning News in Texas. “Commercial real estate lenders are keeping a close eye on developments in Dallas and across the country. Some of the Dallas properties with potential problems are office buildings. Byron Carlock, who leads PriceWaterhouse Coopers U.S. real estate practice, said unlike in previous cycles, the credit woes aren’t the property sector’s fault. ‘Yet the lack of liquidity in the industry to consider refinancing pending maturities plus fears about office and buildings that have lost relevance has all of a sudden created a panic,’ Carlock said.”

CNBC on California. “The owner of this over-the-top, seven-bedroom and 11-bath mansion in Los Angeles is prepared to accept $6 million less than what he paid for it less than two years ago — all to beat a ticking clock. The home features a basketball court, car showroom and a 70-foot infinity pool that appears to float some 45 feet above the mountainside, and it’s on sale for a reduced price of $38 million. If it doesn’t sell by April 1, the property would be subject to a looming new, local mansion tax, which goes into effect next month and could cost the owner a further $2 million.”

“The almost 16,700-square-foot residence was purchased by the trust of wealthy investor Jeffrey Feinberg. About a year after buying it, Feinberg put the home back on the market for $48 million but couldn’t find any takers. The original asking price was chopped down $10 million, or almost 21%. To put that price cut into perspective, it amounts to the home dropping almost $64,000 in value every single week for 94 weeks straight since Feinberg bought it.”

From Bloomberg. “South Korea’s property market risks an accelerated slide triggered by quirks in renting practices. The vulnerability stems from the common choice of tenants to stump up outsized deposits known as jeonse for landlords instead of paying monthly rent. This widespread practice supplies property owners with leveraged cash, putting jeonse at the heart of real estate speculation and financial imbalances in the country. The Bank of Korea and most economists still expect the property downturn to remain contained as a modest and even desirable correction. But economists warn that a deeper real estate slump, fueled by changes in jeonse use, can’t be ruled out.”

“‘Jeonse and purchase prices are falling and they are feeding off each other,’ Kim Woong, director general of research at the BOK, said after the central bank slashed its economic growth forecast, partly on property-market concerns. The rising number of unsold home offerings and the decreasing appetite for mortgage loans indicate that many buyers still consider housing to be too expensive after explosive price growth in recent years.”

“The property market falls are also adding to woes for construction companies already struggling to sell housing. The number of unsold homes nationwide surpassed 75,000 in January, the highest level since 2012, according to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport. That’s more than a five-fold jump from just a year and a half ago. Real estate companies are pulling out all the stops to try and sell property.”

“Now as the housing market wobbles, even a small credit-related event could rekindle risks associated with project financing, according to a NICE Investors Service Co. report last month. ‘It’s like SVB,’ Lee Kang Wook, a general manager for ratings at NICE, said. ‘You must sell these homes to repay the PF loans if you’re a developer,’ he said. ‘Companies that have borrowed more than they can handle will become an issue.'”

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This Post Has 62 Comments

  1. ‘Yet the lack of liquidity in the industry to consider refinancing pending maturities plus fears about office and buildings that have lost relevance has all of a sudden created a panic’

    Wa happened to all that dry powder Byron?

  2. ‘Central banks have swung from frenetic money creation in 2020-21 to the monetary death march of 2023’

    It’s almost like they accelerated right off the cliff. Thelma and Louise style. There was no reason to do what they did unless it was to make the crash worser.

    We read all the time now – they kept rates too low for years. So how do you unwind that? Just like the garbage MBS that have cratered, commercial real estate eased into the world of permanent free money only to wake up one day and half the biz is underwater. Come on Jerry, snap yer fingers and fix it.

    Jerry? Jerry? Bueller? Magic people my a$$.

    2. There was no reason to do what they did

      I’m going to guess that certain people now have much more money and others much less.

      1. The Fed’s “No Billionaire Left Behind” monetary policies further enriched the already super-wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

        1. And now these billionaires are screaming from on high because their free money spigot just shut.

  4. ‘To put that price cut into perspective, it amounts to the home dropping almost $64,000 in value every single week for 94 weeks straight since Feinberg bought it’

    That’s 9143 pesos a day. 380 pesos an hour.

    Wa happened to my red hotcakes?

    via GIPHY

      1. $64K in Yellen Bux “value” flying off to debauched currency heaven from a single mega-mansion. Now extrapolate this to millions of other shacks, and the impairment to the underlying loan collateral seems set to emerge as the next “systemic risk” facing the banking system, especially when millions of underwater FBs stop making mortgage payments. Heckova job, “Zimbabwe Ben” Bernanke, Yellen the Felon, & BlackRock Jay!

        1. $64K in Yellen Bux “value” flying off

          It never existed. It was an imaginary price without a transaction.

    2. “…amounts to the home dropping almost $64,000 in value every single week…”

      Not to mention ongoing holding costs such as property tax(es) and insuranc(es). When holding such a monster property, owners need to think of permanent staff in place, just to dust all the bed and bathrooms, not to mention mow the lawn, paint and fix plumbing. Adding in an extra $10K /week holding cost is not an unreasonable estimate.

  5. Is it generally agreed among experts that the 2007-2009 financial crisis was the last one of comparable magnitude that any of us will ever experience, and too-big-to-fail rescues of systemicslly risky financial institutions are a thing of the past, never again to happen in our lifetimes?

    1. One Bank, Indivisible
      Government decisions are making America into a nation of big banks, and only big banks.
      Nicole Gelinas
      March 24, 2023

      In mid-March, in response to a global financial panic, Swiss regulators forced UBS, a huge Swiss Bank, to purchase Credit Suisse, another huge Swiss Bank. This action created just one huge Swiss bank, with no serious competitors. It’s not good for a nation that prides itself on its financial system to have just one massive bank, with no market forces to keep it nimble. Unfortunately, the United States is heading in the same direction.

      Credit Suisse had been troubled for a while, but it finally fell victim to the fears sweeping the financial system this spring. As Europe and America have hiked interest rates to slow inflation, banks around the world have racked up big losses. The trillions of dollars’ worth of long-term debt they hold—all loans and bonds paying lower interest rates—is now worth less because debt, loans, and bonds issued today command the current higher interest rates. This loss in value comes just as the banks must pay those higher interest rates to keep their depositors’ cash. Investors can never know exactly what banks hold on their books until a crisis occurs, but they figure that only the best-run banks can handle this massive upheaval. Credit Suisse, which had fallen victim to outright fraud several times in the past few years, wasn’t the best-run bank; the collapse came after the bank admitted “material weaknesses” in its financial controls. That’s fine; banks fail from time to time, and a Swiss Bank should have been able to fail and restructure itself under new shareholders and managers.

      Instead of letting Credit Suisse fail, though, Switzerland followed the same strategy that American and European officials deployed 15 years ago, during the global financial crisis: force supposedly strong financial institutions to gobble up weak ones. Back then, JPMorgan Chase bought the investment bank Bear Stearns and the commercial bank Washington Mutual. Bank of America bought Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch. Wells Fargo bought Wachovia Bank. And so on.

      These forced mergers did not quell the panic. The panic arose not because banks weren’t big enough but because they weren’t solvent enough to withstand tens of billions of dollars in defaults on unwisely issued mortgage debt. In forcing big banks to swallow smaller ones, the government didn’t reduce risk; it just agglomerated it. The only thing that stopped a mass exodus from the financial system in the fall of 2008 was Western governments’ explicit and full guarantees of their entire banking systems.

      The 2008 mergers did, however, make a preexisting problem worse: the “too big to fail” phenomenon, which had caused the 2008 crisis in the first place. Well before the financial crisis, beginning in the 1980s, federal officials had made it clear that they wouldn’t allow a large financial firm to go bankrupt, with only its small, FDIC-insured depositors protected from losses. Unsurprisingly, subsidizing big banks with this implicit guarantee created ever-bigger banks, with ever-looser lending standards. The government similarly implicitly guaranteed much of the residential-mortgage market. With no market discipline over either mortgage-related bonds or the banks that invested in them, the 2008 financial collapse was inevitable.

      After 2008, the government tried to negate its actions with words. Yes, the government had created financial firms that were too big to fail; and yes, the government had made such firms even bigger after 2008; and yes, the government had backstopped those tottering firms with explicit taxpayer and central-bank guarantees. But the government promised solemnly it would never do so again, under any circumstances. The Dodd–Frank financial-regulation law, with its strict oversight of large financial firms and its outright prohibition of 2008-style bailouts, would ensure it. As then-President Barack Obama said in signing the law in 2010, the measure “put a stop to taxpayer bailouts once and for all.”
      …
      https://www.city-journal.org/americas-permanent-bank-bailout-regime

    2. Ideas
      What People Still Don’t Get About Bailouts
      Good financial-crisis management is about doing what it takes to stop the contagion.
      By Michael Grunwald
      Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Christopher Cox sit before the Senate banking committee in September 2008
      Chip Somodevilla / Getty
      March 18, 2023

      It doesn’t seem fair, does it? Just 15 years after our financial overlords went on a bailout binge, showering bankers with trillions of taxpayer dollars, they’re once again riding to the rescue of the rich while the public watches in horror. Did they learn none of the lessons from the 2008 meltdown?

      Actually, yes, they did. The government’s financial-crisis managers clearly studied the lessons of 2008, which is one reason the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank a week ago doesn’t seem to have created another cataclysm, at least so far. It’s the public that’s never understood those lessons, which is one reason the public is likely to draw the wrong conclusions about the SVB mess too. And the most important lesson is the hardest to understand: Good financial-crisis management isn’t supposed to seem fair.
      …
      https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/silicon-valley-bank-collapse-2008-recession-bailout/673431/

      1. “…the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank a week ago doesn’t seem to have created another cataclysm, at least so far.”

        It’s quite premature for this real financial journalist to proclaim victory of bailouts over financial crisis within days of the public catching wind that anything was amiss in the banking system.

    4. TheArticle
      Bank bailouts, or: communism for the capitalists
      Friday March 24, 2023
      by Benedikt Koehler

      Bank crises and the bailouts that often ensue are nothing new. Apropos one such bailout, where the authorities had shored up bank solvency by buying up distressed assets, a certain financial journalist wrote, “In other words, the fortune of the whole community, which the Government represents, ought to make good the losses of private capitalists. This sort of communism, where the mutuality is all on one side, seems rather attractive to the European capitalists.”

      The occasion was a bank crisis in Hamburg; the date was November 1857; and the journalist, reporting to readers of the New York Daily Tribune, was Karl Marx.

      Since 1857 bank crises and bailouts have come and gone, each one adding layers of literature to the question why bank crises happen and how to prevent them happening again. And with each crisis, public esteem for authorities that oversee financial markets has risen. In 2022, for his analysis of financial markets dysfunction and for steering them out of the 2008 crisis, Professor Ben Bernanke of Princeton University and the Federal Reserve was awarded Nobel laurels. The complacency of 2022 now seems the swan song of a different era. At the very moment when public esteem for financial market regulators could not have been made more conspicuous, troubles have set in.

      In October 2022 pension funds in London required emergency intervention. In March 2023 distress calls have gone out from distant ends of the globe, from swashbuckling venture capitalists in California and sedate wealth managers in Switzerland. Regulators are discovering that their hold on financial markets is as firm as a grip on a wet bar of soap in a bathtub.

      How did we get here?
      …
      https://www.thearticle.com/bank-bailouts-or-communism-for-the-capitalists

      1. “the journalist, reporting to readers of the New York Daily Tribune, was Karl Marx”

        This was one of the few actual “jobs” that this man ever held in his lifetime. For most of his writing career, he was getting an allowance from Engels (who made his money managing a factory owned by his father).

  7. Re-posting this because it was never about public health, it was about control, submission, tyranny, and MONEY:

    “The elite have made fortunes during the pandemic. It is not just pharmaceutical companies that have profited from Covid, since the beginning of lockdown the wealthiest people have become significantly wealthier.

    In October 2020, Business Insider reported that “billionaires saw their net worth increase by half a trillion dollars” in just the first six months of the pandemic.

    By April 2021 Forbes was reporting that 40 new billionaires have been created “fighting the coronavirus”.

    That process has only accelerated.

    As of May 2022, the number of new billionaires created by the pandemic stood at 543. Or roughly one every 30 hours for the previous two years. That includes 40 new billionaires in the pharmaceutical sector alone.

    Meanwhile, the share of the world’s wealth held by billionaires has increased from 10% in 2019 to 14% in 2022, a greater increase than the previous 16 years combined.

    Altogether, the richest people in the world increased their collective wealth by over five trillion dollars in the past three years, all thanks to Covid.

    https://off-guardian.org/2023/03/24/40-facts-you-need-to-know-the-real-story-of-covid/

    Greatest FRAUD of my lifetime.

    2. Dicktator Nuisance dining at The French Laundry, sans mask, while the poor were locked up inside Section 8 apartments infecting each other, was the ultimate “let them eat cake” moment.

    1. ‘When the pandemic first arrived on Australia’s shores there were widespread concerns that the retail economy could all but collapse, as consumers and lockdowns combined to deliver a knockout blow.

      What occurred in the months that followed was the polar opposite. By July, retail sales had rocketed to sit 11 per cent above where they were prior to the pandemic.

      To put this into perspective, in the 12 months prior to the impact of the pandemic, retail sales grew by just 1.9 per cent on a seasonally adjusted basis.

      Today retail sales are 26.3 per cent higher than where they were prior to the pandemic.

      While this statistic is not adjusted for inflation and higher prices are a significant driver of this growth, it remains miles ahead of where retail sales would sit if they continued on their weak pre-Covid trend’

      The US cabal was pouring many billions monthly into MBS right up until they raised rates. Shack prices had gone up more in 2 years than they ever had in history. Oh but the market ‘needed it’? None of this stuff from the banks was necessary. I really do think they purposefully created inflation, ran these bubbles up so high they had to fall in on themselves and then sprung the trap with rates. They were in on the whole plandemic with the eye to destroy our currencies and nation-states.

      I don’t even want to hear conspiracy. That’s lost all meaning. Here’s an example: isn’t it interesting that at the exact same time, the WHO, WEF and almost all central bankers chimed in and said ‘we’re never going back to normal.’ That’s kind of a final, dramatic statement from a bunch of clowns that probably can’t open a twist off beer with their soft hands. Does that mean we can’t go out of our shacks Jerry? We have to stand on stupid little circles to wait fer out gruel? And wait fer our guberment checks like good little field mice? Well fook you Jerry.

  10. From the Colorado Sun:

    President Joe Biden’s choice to run the Federal Aviation Administration has withdrawn his nomination, a setback for the administration that comes after Denver International Airport CEO Phillip Washington appeared to lack enough support in the closely divided Senate.

    Under Mr. Washington’s watch a billion dollar remodelling of DIA was so mismanaged that it came to screeching halt and work stopped for many months. The job is still nowhere near completion, and is years late with plenty of cost overruns. The airport’s main terminal still looks like a construction zone. Worst of all, the project was a pork barrel, and was utterly unnecessary.

  11. From 9News

    DENVER — A study proposed in Denver’s 2023 budget would examine certain downtown Denver office buildings and look at how feasible it would be to convert them to housing.

    The plan is part of a larger adaptive reuse program the city’s Community Planning and Development team is playing a big role in.

    “Since the pandemic, the downtown has really suffered from vibrancy because a lot of people are now either working from home full time or they have a hybrid work environment,” Adaptive Reuse Senior Project Development Administrator Jenny Buddenborg said.

    She said if approved, the study would specifically look at the feasibility of reusing 10 to 15 high-rise office buildings downtown.

      1. Tents, needles, and feces.

        That’s downtown Denver. And the mayoral election (and subsequent runoff) will change nothing.

    2. “Study would look at feasibility of converting downtown Denver office buildings into housing”

      What is the homeless sidewalk ratio per tennant?

      1. Real Journalists estimate the number of homeless in Denver at 6-7,000, but that seems low.

        1. The study is looking at converting 15 office buildings into “housing”. The only question is: how long will it take the tenants to turn them into uninhabitable feces, urine, meth and fentanyl saturated cesspools, that is until they burn them down?

          1. I used to live where there was a “County Farm”. If you were down and out you could go there and get food and shelter. There was work to be done though, not horrible work, just farm things.

          2. I used to live where there was a “County Farm”

            I’m sure that’s now considered raycis or something. Expecting people to do some chores in exchange for 3 squares and a bed has to be some kind of Orwellian thing.

        2. Real Journalists estimate the number of homeless in Denver at 6-7,000, but that seems low.

          It depends on how “homeless” is defined. The definition used by our local school district includes people who are couch surfing, living with relatives, etc. IIRC about 20 of all students in our district are “homeless”, which even using the loose definition seems rather high.

          Using the more classical definition, what used to be called hobos, my little burg has about 100-200, per local charities. The city passed a camping ban within city limits so the tentfolk moved just outside city limits.

    1. So Brandon’s budget “reduces” the debt to $ 51 trillion. That is some serious coin.

      How does Secretary Treasury Janet Yellen get dismantled by a man who sounds like Mr. Haney from Green Acres anyway?

      Green Acres Best of Mr. Haney

      https://youtu.be/Dhi7oZDiFCg

  14. Does this mean you will be pushed off your couch in front of the vacuum cleaner in NYC when you are watching Netflix?

    New York Democrats Propose ‘Netflix Tax’ to Bail Out Failing Subway System

    DAVID NG
    26 Mar 2023

    Democrats in New York are reportedly weighing a new four percent tax on streaming entertainment subscriptions like Netflix and Hulu to help bail out New York City’s failing subway system, which is facing a $2.5 billion budget deficit by 2025.

    https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2023/03/26/new-york-democrats-propose-netflix-tax-to-bail-out-failing-subway-system/

    1. How would this be enforced? All users will have to do is use their cousin’s address in New Jersey for the subscription and then use a VPN to access the streaming services.

    1. “In November voters supported Measure ULA – “United to House L.A.” – which is intended to raise up to $1 billion from luxury house sales to fund affordable housing projects.”

      More stealing under the guise of Socialism.

    2. They won’t be the last to flee.

      I wonder how long until Newsom gets Prop 13 overturned and starts to crank up everyone’s property tax.

        1. Are you suggesting that the Golden state’s middle-class will exercise their 2nd Amendment rights and form a resistance, e.g., the California Territorial Defense Forces?

  17. “Central banks have swung from frenetic money creation in 2020-21 to the monetary death march of 2023, with all key measures of the money supply flashing red warnings in America and Europe.”

    From MMT (Magic Money Tree) to MDM (Monetary Death March)…

  18. Did you decide it would be safer to keep your money parked in a money market fund than at the bank? (Never mind stocks, bonds, crypto, real estate, or other risk assets…those are so 2021!)

    1. The Financial Times
      US banks
      Money market funds swell by more than $286bn as investors pull deposits from banks
      Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Fidelity benefit from big inflows amid turmoil in financial sector
      Trader on phone in front of Goldman Sachs logo
      Goldman’s US money funds have taken in nearly $52bn, a 13% increase since the day before Silicon Valley Bank was taken over by US authorities on March 10
      Brooke Masters, Harriet Clarfelt and Kate Duguid in New York yesterday

      Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Fidelity are the biggest winners from investors pouring cash into US money market funds over the past two weeks, as the collapse of two regional US banks and the rescue deal for Credit Suisse raised concerns about the safety of bank deposits.

      More than $286bn has flooded into money market funds so far in March, making it the biggest month of inflows since the depths of the Covid-19 crisis, according to data provider EPFR.

      Goldman’s US money funds have taken in nearly $52bn, a 13 per cent increase, since March 9, the day before Silicon Valley Bank was taken over by US authorities. JPMorgan’s funds received nearly $46bn and Fidelity recorded inflows of almost $37bn, according to iMoneyNet data as of Friday morning.
      …

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