Is there a link here?

I’m curious what the reasons for the surge in money market funds might be. The return seems paltry. Over past year, money market mutual funds returned an average 1.97%. VG’s did slightly better at 2.35%. https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual-funds/profile/overview/VMMXX (Need to click on “Price & Performance”.)
Geez - Give me anything but one of these .... A night in Vegas? Online poker? Clean the attic and sell some antiques?
A couple alternatives to money market funds for folks with at least a few years time horizon and able to live with some principal fluctuation: TRBUX- one year 3.51%, DODIX - one year 8.17%

Inflated bond ratings were one cause of the financial crisis. A decade later, there is evidence they persist. In the hottest parts of the booming bond market, S&P and its competitors are giving increasingly optimistic ratings as they fight for market share.
All six main ratings firms have since 2012 changed some criteria for judging the riskiness of bonds in ways that were followed by jumps in market share, at least temporarily, a Wall Street Journal examination found. These firms compete with one another to rate the debt of borrowers, who pay for the ratings and have an incentive to pick rosier ones.
There are signs some investors are skeptical. Some bonds in markets where ratings criteria have been eased don’t trade at the high bond prices their ratings suggest they should. Investors have also shown skepticism about ratings on some corporate and government bonds.
“We don’t trust the ratings,” says Greg Michaud, director of real estate at Voya Investment Management, which holds $21 billion in commercial-real-estate debt.
The problem is particularly acute in the fast-growing market for “structured” debt—securities using pools of loans such as commercial and residential mortgages, student loans and other borrowings. The deals are carved into different slices, or “tranches,” each with varying risks and returns, which means rating firms are crucial to their creation.
The Journal analyzed about 30,000 ratings within a $3 trillion database of structured securities issued between 2008 and 2019. The Journal’s analysis suggests a key regulatory remedy to improve rating quality—promoting competition—has backfired. DBRS, Kroll and Morningstar were more likely to give higher grades than Moody’s, S&P and Fitch on the same bonds. Sometimes one firm called a security junk and another gave a triple-A rating deeming it supersafe.
Two fast-growing structured-bond sectors are commercial mortgage-backed securities, or CMBS, and collateralized loan obligations, or CLOs. CMBS fund deals for hotels, shopping malls and the like. CLOs are backed by corporate loans to risky borrowers, typically to fund buyouts.
In a May speech, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell compared CLOs to precrisis mortgage-backed debt: “Once again, we see a category of debt that is growing faster than the income of the borrowers even as lenders loosen underwriting standards.”
Behind the ratings inflation is a long-acknowledged flaw Washington didn’t fix: Entities that issue bonds—state and local governments, hotel and mall financiers, companies—also pay for their ratings. Issuers have incentive to hire the most lenient rating firm, because interest payments are lower on higher-rated bonds. Increased competition lets issuers more easily shop around for the best outcome.
Rating analysts say their firms have lost deals because they wouldn’t provide the desired ratings.
In the first half of 2015, S&P’s share of ratings in the $600 billion CLO market hit a five-year low. That fall S&P changed its methodology to make it easier for CLOs to get higher ratings. When S&P again proposed loosening its criteria this year, a group representing more than 100 professional bond investors wrote a letter to the company, reviewed by the Journal, saying the changes “will lead to a weakening of credit protection for investors at a time where we need it most.” S&P proceeded.
Moody’s ratings on riskier slices of these multi-borrower deals often weren’t as favorable as those of its competitors. By 2015, issuers “essentially stopped soliciting our ratings” on those slices, according to a January commentary from the company. In October 2015, Moody’s eased its rating methodology for single-asset CMBS deals.
In 2016 Fitch [gave] itself wider latitude to use easier rating assumptions.
Investors say ratings inflation is most evident in commercial-mortgage-backed securities, or CMBS, of which investors hold about $1.2 trillion. When rating a security higher than their three big competitors, Morningstar, Kroll and DBRS were around two rungs more generous, on average. Some ratings were a dozen or more rungs higher, potentially the difference between junk bonds and triple-A.
A group of professional investors in 2015 complained about inflated ratings to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Adam Hayden, who manages a $13 billion securities portfolio at New York Life Insurance Co.’s real-estate-investment arm, was among the investors who met with the SEC. He said inflated ratings were a risk to market stability, according to a meeting memo obtained by the Journal.
The SEC didn’t implement their recommendations.

BREAKING: A Treasury Department statement said that China had manipulated the exchange rate between its currency and the U.S. dollar to gain an “unfair competitive advantage.”
The move follows the biggest one-day stock market loss of 2019, and stoked fears that a commercial dispute with no end in sight would do significant damage to a slowing global economy. China answered President Trump’s latest tariffs on Monday by allowing its tightly-controlled currency to slide to an 11-year low against the dollar, a move that threatened to turn the U.S.-China trade conflict into a global economic contagion.
Treasury’s view was potentially even more important on Monday, because Trump alleged China was manipulating its currency, a practice that is expressly in the department’s purview.
The currency shift also will effectively counter the Federal Reserve’s recent interest rate cut by leading to tighter financial conditions in the United States, said Robin Brooks, chief economist of the Institute of International Finance.
As of midafternoon, all three major U.S. stock indexes were having their worst day of 2019, falling more than 3 percent — fresh off having their worst week of the year. The Dow Jones industrial average was down more than 800 points, or more than 3 percent. The Standard & Poor’s 500 was off by nearly 93 points, or 3.1 percent, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq was down nearly 303 points, or nearly 3.8 percent. — a six-day losing streak. Trade bellwethers Caterpillar and Boeing were down 2 percent.
The yuan’s move will likely make it difficult for developing countries that need to cut interest rates to spur growth, such as India. Instead, they will pressure to raise interest rates to attract investment, a move that would further curb growth.
China’s central bank said it was confident it could keep the currency at a “reasonable and balanced level.” Beijing is expected to try to prevent an unrestrained plunge by the yuan, fearing it would encourage Chinese citizens to take their wealth out of the country, economists said.
The yuan has actually held up better against the surging dollar than most U.S. trading partners. Its year-to-date decline against the dollar of 2.4 percent is much less than the currencies of two U.S. allies, the Taiwan dollar at 3.4 percent and the South Korean won at 8.6 percent.
Beijing appeared to mount other forms of retaliation on Monday. The government has asked state-owned firms to stop their U.S. agricultural purchases, according to a Bloomberg report Monday that was widely cited by Chinese media. The crop purchases, which came from states that comprise Trump’s political base, were supposed to be a sign of Chinese goodwill as trade talks progressed.