Powell Mentions MMFs on 60 Minutes
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell mentioned money market funds during his appearance on the TV show "60 Minutes" Sunday. He comments, "Most parts of the financial system made it through quite a stress test last year, when we lost 25 percent of GDP and 30 million jobs in the space of a couple of months. Now, some parts of the financial system had to be bailed out again, places like money market funds and things like that, where we had to step in again and provide liquidity.... There's a structural issue and we know this, and it really is time to address it decisively. And that just is sometimes there arises a situation where people want to take their money out, and it's difficult for money market funds to turn their assets into cash quickly enough. So, what's had to happen twice is the Fed came in and became a source of liquidity for money market funds." Powell added, "After the Global Financial Crisis when it happened the first time we did some reforms, those reforms worked a little bit, but they didn't really do the job because once again this time we had to step in to provide liquidity on behalf of the Government to bail out these private businesses. And when something has happened twice it really is time to fix it. Every private business ought to have the ability to deal with the range of plausible things that might happen to it and that's true of money market funds as it is for other businesses." Lastly, he added, "There are many ideas that are out there and they're all under discussion, by the way internationally as well. What it boils down to, is that money market funds are going to need to be resilient enough so that if they have a liquidity shock like this they can handle it."
