Broke The Buck

Whhooooaa, Cowboy! Tex was so busy training his steers for the upcoming rodeo that he didn’t notice that the net asset value (NAV) of the money market fund with his life’s savings fell to less than $1.00.

In financial parlance, this is known as “breaking the buck,” but when his financial planner told Tex, “your fund broke the buck,” Tex thought he meant it had damaged his prize cattle and closed his account.

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Finance: What does "Breaking the Buck" M...7 Views

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Finance allah shmoop what does breaking the buck mean Okay

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so there's this dog and call of the wild Remember

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him Alright Wait That's different and it wasn't broken He

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just became wild at the end Right Isn't that what

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happened All right well anyway breaking the buck in finance

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land is about the price of a money market fund

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as indexed to a dollar Well that is normally when

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you invested dollar while you get more than a dollar

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back Right Like a finance kindergarten concept One o one

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in money market funds Thie investment is design id lee

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Very low risk and low reward And it is purposely

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set up to be extremely liquid and safe That is

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that buck or dollar invested should almost always be sacred

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And the pricing of a money market fund composed mostly

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a very safe short term bonds Well it should always

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be above that buck If it weren't it would mean

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that you were getting less money than a dollar when

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you invested a dollar And that would be bad right

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And know that buck is the net asset value or

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in a v of essentially all money market funds just

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make the math easy here If nothing else if it

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breaks the buck and trades below a dollar well then

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it means that investors investing a dollar will in fact

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get like ninety nine cents back or ninety eight cents

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back Well how on earth can this happen Is it

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fraud Deceit chicken ary Well those could be issues but

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the breaking the buck phenomenon actually happened during the mortgage

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crisis of two thousand nine when interest rates were extremely

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low in fact so low that the throw or interest

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from those bonds wasn't enough to cover the operating costs

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of managing those money market funds There was a whole

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lot of risk it that time to remember We thought

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the financial system hopefully bust well is an extremely bad

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situation for the bank which sold those funds as extremely

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safe toe widows orphans and nervous nellies all around the

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world with the cost of running One of these funds

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isn't zero There are legal costs secretary cost brokerage costs

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or spreads rent insurance all that stuff which is must

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have in the world of managing a fund So when

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rates fell extremely low and or the managers of that

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fund took on all kinds of crazy weird derivatives risk

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trying to goose another ten basis points of performance out

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of their money market fund wealth They only found that

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the results whipsawed and cut well pretty much their arms

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and other appendages off It was potentially calamitous for the

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banks and the brokers involved So breaking the buck is

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a rare phenomenon in history It's happened only a few

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times and when it did it was oh so bad 00:02:49.99 --> [endTime] That whipsaw is wicked That's gotta hurt

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