Vanguard Investments reached a notable milestone in the United States last week by becoming the largest managed fund investment group in terms of assets under management.

The Pennsylvania–based manager ousted American Funds – part of Capital Group – as the industry leader after netting a staggering company record US$103 billion in new net flows in 2007 to end the latter’s six-year reign in pole position.

With a whopping US$1.3 trillion in funds under management Vanguard is sitting on a significant amount of money whichever way you look at it and whatever MERs (management expense ratios) it may be charging.

In fact, burning ants was so impressed by the figure we thought we’d have a look and see how this bounty of assets compares to some of the gross domestic product counts of some countries.

Obviously, US$1.3 trillion is not enough to surpass the output of some of the leading economies of the industrialised world.

According to the World Bank, the GDP of the US in 2006 was a whopping US$13.2 trillion, while Japan was US$4.3 trillion, Germany was US$2.9 trillion and China was US$2.7 trillion.

However, if it was a sovereign state (and the money was obviously its own) $1.3 trillion would have made the group the eight biggest economies in the world in 2006 ahead of the likes of Canada, Spain, Brazil, Russia, India, South Korea, Mexico and Australia.

Vanguard benefited from strong flows into its various money market funds – the group is one of the biggest providers of such funds – as worried investors tried to secure their assets.

Meanwhile, American Funds, which has a mere US$1 trillion of assets under management, does not have a strong presence in money market funds.