David Goddard, treasurer of Verisign Corp., the $1.5-billion Internet infrastructure firm, spends part of each week in his Mountain View, Calif., office hunched over printouts of his company's short-term money market fund investments with a ruler. He goes line by line through the holdings of each fund to see exactly what they are. "This job has changed in a way I never expected to see in my career," says the 44-year-old treasurer, who assumed his post in December 2006. "But because of the things happening now that haven't happened since the Great Depression, this is the future. Transparency is critical to ensuring liquidity, and you have to know what you're investing in."

Goddard, also president of the Silicon Valley Treasury Management Association, says that he is not alone in his new heightened concern about the quality and liquidity of his company's short-term cash investments. "I'm constantly in contact with other treasurers," he says, "and we're definitely seeing a flight to liquidity and to quality. Certainly getting a good return is on everyone's list of priorities, but it's not the highest priority. The highest priority is preserving capital and liquidity."

Goddard's comments are supported by the data. Chrystal Pozin, a principal at consultancy Treasury Strategies Inc., reports that since 2007, institutional management funds have surged 45% to $9.1 trillion, with much of that growth in money market funds, which have doubled to $420 billion. It has, she reports, been the biggest corporate swing to safety since late 2001, following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Pozin says she recently hosted a panel where one treasurer confirmed that his firm is spreading its cash around, but because there are such low limits on how much can be put in any single institution, they're running out of places to park the money. Even bank deposits are being limited by treasuries because of concerns about the risks at the banks themselves, she reports.