“This may be the peak before it all falls apart again.”

So said Peter Crane, president of Crane Data, on Monday—the first day of the Crane's Money Fund Symposium, which bills itself as the largest meeting of money-market fund managers and cash investors in the world. He added that he was putting a positive spin on the industry by noting that assets are currently rising in a circumstance when balances typically fall. The amount of money in government and prime funds has soared in 2019 to more than $3 trillion, the most since the financial crisis, driven by U.S. short-term yields exceeding those of longer-maturing bonds.

On its face, the impetus to park money in ultra-safe money-market funds makes a lot of sense. After all, equities are at or near all-time highs, corporate-bond spreads have tightened across the board, and the yield curve is inverted, inevitably raising the specter of a coming recession. In fact, I posited in late March that inversion would most likely accelerate the dash for cash, after noting that during January and February, individual investors bought $39 billion of Treasury bills at auctions, the most since at least 2009.