Reserve Fund’s Investors Still Await Their Cash

The national “bank holiday” that ushered in the New Deal in 1933 locked up the public’s cash for four days. The crisis that hit last month at the Reserve Fund, the nation’s oldest money market fund, has frozen hundreds of thousands of customer accounts for more than six weeks — with no sure end in sight.

At least 400,000 people, and perhaps as many as a million, can’t get access to their savings, a problem that has quietly persisted in spite of widely publicized federal efforts to restore confidence in money-fund investments.

Some of these customers — who, like most Americans, assumed their money funds were as safe and accessible as bank accounts — are getting desperate.

“Longer term, I just don’t know how we’ll deal with it,” said John Oakes, a retired engineer in Austin, Tex., who can’t tap $20,000 in a Reserve account to pay his mother’s nursing home bill. “They say we may get some money this week, but we don’t know if we’ll get 100 percent, 90 percent or 30 percent.”

Sandra and Lawton Dews, a retired couple in North Myrtle Beach, S.C., had more than $250,000 — 35 percent of their retirement assets —invested in the Reserve US Government Fund.

“They even bragged that you could sleep at night if you invested in their funds,” Mrs. Dews said. “In the past month and a half, we don’t sleep at all.”

Her insomnia began soon after Sept. 15, when the Reserve Fund was hit by a wave of redemptions, apparently because its largest fund had a stake in notes backed by the newly bankrupt Lehman Brothers.

The next day, its $62 billion Primary Fund and two small offshore funds “broke the buck,” incurring losses that pushed their per-share price below a dollar.

Only one other money fund, a small bank fund, had ever broken the buck, and the announcement on Sept. 16 sent tremors from Wall Street to Washington. It ultimately played a role in persuading the Treasury to set up a temporary insurance program for money market funds.

And the Reserve Fund had seemed the least likely candidate for trouble, given its long and stable history — its founder, the legendary Henry B. R. Brown, had invented money market funds.

Initially, the company simply announced that it would delay redemptions from the Primary Fund for up to seven days, as allowed by law. Customers were somewhat reassured, but anyone trying to get additional information was met with busy phone lines and unanswered e-mail.

The news occasionally posted on the fund’s Web site got steadily worse. On Sept. 18, investors in a host of other Reserve money funds learned that their money would be tied up for as long as a week; that delay later became open-ended. On Sept. 19, the fund delayed redemptions from both the Primary Fund and the US Government Fund indefinitely.

Since then, investors have been on a roller coaster of broken promises, with the company repeatedly blaming its record-keeping systems for delays.

Several requests for comment from management of the Reserve Fund have been declined. “I have no confidence at all in what it says,” said Mrs. Dews.

Mrs. Dews and Mr. Oakes are among the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed against the Primary Fund and the Reserve Fund management by Girard Gibbs, a law firm in San Francisco.

It is one of eight cases pending against the fund company, including one that accuses the fund management of tipping off big investors before the Primary Fund broke the buck so they could get out in time — an allegation the fund has denied.

Many Reserve investors say their issue has become the forgotten crisis. “The government is focused on the banks and the big problems,” said Sherry Bryan, a retired industrial photographer in Atlanta. “But this is happening right now to real people.”

Ms. Bryan, 58, said she thought of her Reserve Fund investment as “very safe — an ‘old-granny’ investment.” She added, “We really never expected to lose money on this.”

Ms. Bryan has tried to keep a sense of humor about having to “tighten my belt and tighten it again.” Selling other nest-egg securities in a bad market to pay her bills was “like I’d gone out and bought a speedboat and a Mercedes and traveled all around Europe,” she added. “It’s cost me the same amount of money, but I didn’t have any of the fun.”

The Reserve has posted updates on its Web site, www.ther.com. In those reports, it has asked customers to be patient as it tries to cope with “these unprecedented events.”

CONTINUED : Not typical of money market funds

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