Nor were the MMFs the only ones. Corporations began to manage their cash pools more professionally. Ultrarich individuals who became more and more numerous from the 1970s onward had billions of dollars that were managed by funds and family offices. By the end of the 1990s perhaps as much as a trillion dollars had accumulated in these institutional cash pools, looking for highly liquid, interest-yielding investment opportunities that were absolutely, or close to absolutely, safe.30 Lending against security, or buying the commercial paper of well-known investment banks, was precisely the kind of
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