Henry B. R. Brown

Henry Bedinger Rust Brown (February 13, 1926 – August 11, 2008) was an American financial consultant known for inventing the world's first money market fund, the Reserve Fund, with Bruce R. Bent in 1970.

Early career Brown was born on February 13, 1926, in Pittsburgh, where his father worked as an executive for a company that manufactured blast furnaces. he attended Harvard University, where he was a cartoonist for the Harvard Lampoon. After graduating from college he worked for Chemical Bank in the early 1950s and later worked for a company that would later become part of Citibank. In 1963 he joined the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association in a position where he managed the firm's securities investments. While well-heeled investors could earn high yields by purchasing certificates of deposit or commercial paper, investments that required investments that could reach hundreds of thousands of dollars, typical consumers were effectively frozen out of this market. Banks in the United States were able to gather substantial funds that they were able to lend out with interest without paying any returns on the funds they had received from depositors. By the end of that year they had garnered investments of $100 million. The money market fund industry grew by leaps and bounds, becoming an industry that had amassed $3.5 trillion in assets by the time of Brown's death in 2008, with the Reserve Fund alone accounting for $62 billion in assets.

Money market funds seek to maintain a stable $1.00 net asset value, never losing money. In the financial turmoil following the September 2008 bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, just one month after Brown's death, the Reserve Fund saw a run on its investments after it marked down to zero the value of assets it had invested in Lehman's securities, forcing it to "break the buck", leaving investors who had held onto their investments in the fund to lose as much as three to five percent of their investment.

Personal life After his retirement from the financial industry, he joined with partner Chris Gerow in competing in the annual Punkin Chunkin event held in Delaware.