A decline was largely expected as a result of TAG expiring and the end of Operation Twist. The former had given large risk-averse investors a safe place to stash their money, and the latter had allowed flooded dealer inventories with safe collateral against which slightly less risk-averse investors and MMFs could reverse repo and get a tad extra yield.

This is Goldman’s first report on its money market funds to disclose daily net asset values (h/t Tracy):

Well, the expiration of TAG increasingly appears inevitable, and today the Wall Street Journal reports:

First a bit of background. Dodd-Frank section 120 authorises the FSOC “to provide for more stringent regulation of a financial activity by issuing recommendations to the primary financial regulatory agencies to apply new or heightened standards and safeguards… if the Council determines that the conduct, scope, nature, size, scale, concentration, or interconnectedness of such activity or practice could create or increase the risk of significant liquidity, credit, or other problems spreading among bank holding companies and nonbank financial companies, financial markets of the United States.”

However, according to Fitch’s latest Macro Credit Research report on Friday, they seem much more confident about building up exposure on secured terms. As a result, repos as a percentage of exposure to European banks is on the rise to new post-crisis levels:

That’s from John Gapper’s column on the failure of the Securities and Exchange Commission to tame the $2.6tn US money market fund industry. Cardiff also has a few words to say on the topic.

Mary Schapiro, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, has announced that her proposal to reform the industry would not go to a vote because three of the SEC’s five commissioners had already announced their opposition to it. (Two were already expected. Until today, the position of Luis Aguilar remained unknown.)

(In our post we had asked what the market monetarists thought of the issues we raised.)