The amount of cash in money-market funds has surged by more than $100 billion so far in August, pushing assets to a record as investors lock in lofty yields before the US Federal Reserve starts cutting interest rates. Much of the latest increase in money-market fund assets came from retail investors, which totaled $21.4 billion. Institutional investors added about $3.45 billion, offset by an exodus from the prime space—a response to a set of Securities and Exchange Commission regulations slated to take effect later this year, which has caused some funds to shutter and investors to shift around their allocations.
Ever since President Joe Biden told Americans last month he wasn’t running for re-election and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to succeed him, public opinion has shifted. For the first time, Democrats are leading in most of the seven so-called swing states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin. Perhaps nowhere is the race for the Oval Office more transformed than in North Carolina, Matt Winkler writes in Bloomberg Opinion. The ninth-most populous state with almost 11 million people could deliver for Harris the way it did for Barack Obama. The issue for Harris, however, is that North Carolina’s prevailing media narrative is no different from that other swing states, he writes. Which is to say, it omits the superior growth in gross domestic product, jobs and personal income the state has witnessed under Biden—something it never experienced under Donald Trump.