Money market funds could attract substantial sums of cash if unlimited government insurance on bank accounts used by corporations and some municipalities expires at year-end. More than a trillion dollars now reside in bank transaction accounts that pay no interest, but are popular due to uncapped insurance by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).
"The expiration of TAGs (Transaction Account Guarantees) would be the best news money funds have seen in the past five years," said Peter Crane, president of Crane Data, which tracks money market mutual funds.
Indeed, the 2008 financial crisis and an ensuing period of low interest rates that makes it hard to offer investors a good return on short-term money have given money funds - with $2.55 trillion in assets as of July 11, 2012 - a tough few years.
Without the enticement of unlimited insurance, corporate and municipal treasurers who now use the TAG accounts to manage short-term cash might put some of those funds into money market funds in hopes of earning at least some return on the money.
"No one knows the exact amount (that would return to money market funds), but it's safe to say we're talking in the hundreds of billions of dollars," said Jerry Klein, managing director and partner at HighTower's Treasury Partners, with $20 billion in assets under management.
That the FDIC insures bank accounts up to $250,000 is widely known. But fewer people are aware of the unlimited FDIC insurance provision that TAG accounts enjoy - or how much the balances in those accounts have grown since their inception.
Intended to help stabilise the banking system, the transaction (TAG) accounts with their unlimited insurance coverage were forged by the FDIC, in consultation with the US Treasury and Federal Reserve Board, in the fire of the 2008 financial crisis.
In 2010, The Dodd-Frank Act said all banks must participate in the program. The FDIC then extended the unlimited insurance provision on the accounts, citing "lingering effects" of the financial crisis and the risk that letting the TAG program expire when the economy was weak could cause some community banks already under stress to lose deposits and risk failure.
The provision is now set to expire on December 31, 2012.
In just over two years, however, the amount of deposits insured by the FDIC through the TAG program has nearly quintupled, according to FDIC quarterly banking data.
The 6,400 depository institutions involved in the program held an estimated $266 billion of deposits above the typical insured deposit limit of $250,000 - and guaranteed by the FDIC through the TAG program - at the end of 2009.
By March 31, 2012, however, total assets in the Dodd-Frank Domestic Noninterest-Bearing Transaction Accounts larger than $250,000 had grown to $1.507 trillion.
The portion that exceeded the usual $250,000 limit on FDIC insurance was $1.319 trillion.
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