Americans are sitting on a cash pile as stocks reel

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Cash is looking more and more attractive these days. Stocks tumbled after President Trump escalated his trade war against the rest of the world.

But rather than scooping up shares trading at cheaper prices, many investors are opting to keep their cash on hand. Investors poured more than $60 billion into money-market funds in the first few days of April. That has sent assets in such funds to a record $7.4 trillion as of Thursday, according to Crane Data going back to 1972.

Market watchers have closely monitored the trillions of dollars that have piled up in cash investments over the past few years, with some anticipating that much of it would eventually flood into stocks and power the market’s next leg higher. Those expectations are on hold for now. “I’m just sitting on as much cash as possible," said Matthew Shaughnessy, who runs an auto repair shop and a pet spa in Idaho.

“If I try to catch this falling knife, I’m just going to get cut over and over and over on the way down." The 43-year-old said he sold his shares in Rivian and Roblox in the days leading to Trump’s Rose Garden tariff announcement, preparing for what he expected would be a big selloff. He still owns shares of Novo Nordisk and has some $10,000 in cash in a brokerage account, Shaughnessy said. He doesn’t plan to buy any more stocks until the market carnage subsides.

Stocks, oil, and government bond yields tumbled after Trump’s aggressive tariffs kicked off a global trade war and fueled recession fears. All major indexes logged their worst week since 2020. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed in a correction, a 10% drop from its December high, while the Nasdaq Composite entered bear market territory, a decline of 20%