Guide to Analysing Companies

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centre within a matter of hours. The Financial Action Task
Force, an international body that tries to tackle money launder-
ing, has come up with several ambitious plans to clamp down
on it. The trouble is that most of these involve increasing corpor-
ate transparency and outlawing such things as bearer secu-
rities, which most countries are reluctant to do.
If you want to know what God thinks of money, 
just look at the people he gave it to.
Dorothy Parker
Money market
The market in which banks and other financial institutions buy
and sell short-term financial instruments such as
bills and commercial paper. These days the market also in-
cludes an array of derivatives products based on the under-
lying securities, which are also short-term. (See also
money-market fund.)
Money is like a sixth sense without which 
you cannot make full use of the other five.
W. Somerset Maugham
Money-market fund
A fund which gathers individuals’ small savings and invests
them in the money market. Money-market funds are particu-
larly popular in the United States, where controls on interest
rates restrict the amount that banks can pay on such deposits.
By investing in such funds, investors can get the benefit of in-
vesting in unregulated short-term financial instru-
ments such as bills and commercial paper. Securities held
in a money-market fund typically mature within a month or so.
In the United States, money-market funds are big business,
but the money deposited in them is not insured by the govern-
ment. So the sec, the main regulator of the country’s financial
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markets, insists that most funds are rated by at least one recog-
nised agency.