Is Your Money Market Fund Next To Go Under?

Um….

The financial meltdown surpassed another dismal milestone today as the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers forced one of the world’s premiere money market funds to record a loss — the first for such a fund in 14 years. If you’re scared that you, too, are going to get slammed, put your money in an FDIC-insured savings account and/or invest it in a money-market fund at a major firm that will be publicly humiliated if its funds drop. This is no guarantee, of course (the fund that lost money today is a big one), but it’s better than investing in little money-market funds no one has ever heard of.

My mother-in-law is about to empty her deceased husband’s 401K because it is all she has to live on. This is getting very ugly and people are scared of losing everything, and I am afraid of what will happen when people start taking all their money out of the market. As MTD reader Travis said in a previous comment “Privatized profits, nationalize risk” – we, the regular people, are the ones who are going to suffer this.

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