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The Reserve Primary Fund owned $785 million in Lehman Brothers debt when Lehman filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 15, 2008, and “broke the buck” as the loss it suffered from this debt reduced the fund’s assets to less than the $1 per share that investors counted on.

About 250 trillion in money market mutual funds held by the end of March 2013, according to the Fed's flow of funds statistics, there are about $ 1.1 trillion this belongs to the family. These funds are still an important part of the short-term credit markets by businesses and households rely on. In the future issues the industry will no doubt ensure that other interventions, taxpayers and the broader economic risks - and the fact that the taxpayer made money in the intervening five years ago does not change the reality of the problem in the money market mutual funds, a very earth has exacerbated the plight of the financial markets following the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

Money-market funds are the largest collective buyer of U.S. commercial paper, and their sudden withdrawal caused the market to seize up. Companies with outstanding paper faced possible insolvency because they couldn't roll maturing debt into new issues.

Faced with huge redemptions from investors seeking cash, money market funds reduced their purchases of commercial paper, which are the short-term debt obligations used by many corporations to generate cash for their day-to-day needs. Corporations that could not float commercial paper turned to their standby bank lines of credit — something no one had anticipated would happen en masse.

This huge involuntary expansion of bank lending led to a reduction in banks’ provision of credit to other firms, especially by banks without stable deposit bases that thus themselves relied on short-term debt markets for financing.

The crisis showed that money funds were vulnerable to runs that could damage broader credit markets.