You couldn’t make it up. The European Commission’s rules for money market funds will deprive EU companies of a valuable financial tool and drive billions of investor money offshore, maybe into less well regulated domiciles. Oh, and they are inadequate for their stated purpose.

Money market funds are mutual funds that invest in short-term financial instruments. These can fluctuate in value and, for about half of funds, this is reflected in their daily price. All the fuss is about so-called "constant net asset value" (CNAV) funds, which are allowed to amortise these fluctuations and maintain a constant price. In return they can invest only in a much narrower range of instruments than their variable NAV - or VNAV - cousins.