Morningstar's August fund-flows report is out, and Vanguard's [profile] distribution people can breathe easy again. A month after being unseated from the top of the flows list by Pimco [profile], Vanguard has restored order and reclaimed its familiar position at the top, taking in $7.2 billion in August, compared to Pimco's $5.3 billion.

JPMorgan came in third, with $3.1 billion in new flows, DoubleLine attracted another $1.9 billion to claim fourth place, and T. Rowe Price claimed fifth with $1.5 billion.

And poor American Funds is still hemorrhaging money, with nearly $5.3 billion in withdrawals in August.

Old Westbury [profile] made a surprising appearance on the list of net inflow leaders, taking in $1.4 billion for the month. Most of that new money went into the Old Westbury Global Opportunities Fund, a fixed-income fund with $6.8 billion in AUM that has returned 12.16 percent year to date.

The bigger picture from Morningstar's report is the deluge of money coming into bond funds. For the month, investors put $30 billion into taxable-bond funds and ETFs and $5.6 billion into muni funds, while redeeming $14.3 billion from U.S. stock funds.

And the taste for fixed-income return is drawing investors to riskier products. Emerging markets bond funds took in $2.2 billion, multi-sector bonds $2.1 billion, and high-yield muni $1.3 billion.

Morningstar editorial director Kevin McDevitt sounded a bit skeptical. "How many ways can this quest for yield end badly?" he writes.

Read the full report here. 

Correction: The initial version of Morningstar's report (and thus the initial version of this article) gave the wrong flow numbers for Russell Investments. Russell actually suffered net outflows of $204 million in August and thus did not make the top-10 fund families by inflows list. The article now links to the corrected report from Morningstar.

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