Fitch Affirms Goldman Sachs Financial Square Prime Obligations Fund at 'AAAmmf'

Fitch Ratings affirms the 'AAAmmf' rating assigned to the Goldman Sachs Financial Square Prime Obligations Fund, a money market fund managed by Goldman Sachs Asset Management, L.P. (GSAM).

KEY RATING DRIVERS

The main drivers for the affirmation are:

-- The portfolio's overall credit quality and diversification;

-- Low exposure to interest rate and spread risks;

-- Short maturity profile with high overnight and one-week liquidity, consistent with funds' shareholders profile and concentration;

-- The capabilities and resources of GSAM as investment advisor.

PORTFOLIO CREDIT QUALITY/DIVERSIFICATION

Consistent with Fitch's 'AAAmmf' money market fund rating criteria, the fund seeks to maintain a high credit quality by investing exclusively in short-term securities rated at least 'F1' by Fitch or equivalent. In line with its investment policies, the fund limits its exposures to individual issuers at 5% of the fund's assets. The fund limits its exposure to individual repurchase agreement counterparties to 25% of their total assets for those repurchase agreements fully collateralized by U.S. Treasury and government securities. Other types of repurchase agreements entail lower counterparty exposure limits.

At the day of the rating affirmation and during the past year the fund's Portfolio Credit Factor (PCF), which is a risk-weighted measure of the fund's portfolio assets accounting for the credit quality and maturity profile of the portfolio securities, met Fitch's 'AAAmmf' rating criterion of 1.50 or less.

MATURITY PROFILE

The fund seeks to limit interest rate and spread risk consistent with Fitch's ratings criteria for funds rated 'AAAmmf' by maintaining its weighted average maturity (WAM) and weighted average life (WAL) below 60 days and 120 days, respectively. It also limits the maturity date of any single investment to 397 days. This maturity limit could be reduced depending on the creditworthiness of the issuer.

LIQUIDITY PROFILE

The fund's additional investment restrictions are aimed at maintaining sufficient levels of daily and weekly liquidity to meet investors' redemption requests. Specifically, the fund must invest at least 10% of its total assets in daily liquid securities and at least 30% of its total assets in weekly liquid. At the day of the rating affirmation, the fund fully met its liquidity requirements.

FUND OBJECTIVES

The Goldman Sachs Prime Obligations Fund seeks to maximize current income to the extent consistent with the preservation of capital and maintenance of liquidity. The fund pursues its investment objective by investing in U.S. government securities, obligations of U.S. banks, commercial paper and other short-term obligations of U.S. companies, states, municipalities and other entities and repurchase agreements.

Per its prospectus, the fund does not incur any direct exposure to foreign entities, although such exposures may be incurred indirectly, for example, through investments in asset-backed commercial paper programs sponsored by foreign financial institutions. As of May 19, 2012, the fund had $20.1 billion in assets under management.

INVESTMENT ADVISOR

GSAM is an affiliate of Goldman Sachs Group (rated 'A/F1' by Fitch). GSAM manages assets on behalf of institutions and individuals worldwide through a variety of equity, fixed income, cash management and alternative investment products. Fitch views GSAM's investment advisory capabilities, resource commitment, operational controls, corporate governance, and compliance procedures as consistent with the rating assigned to the fund.

RATING SENSITIVITY AND SURVEILLANCE

The ratings may be sensitive to material changes in the credit quality or market risk profiles of the fund. A material adverse deviation from Fitch's guidelines for any key rating driver could cause Fitch to downgrade the ratings. For additional information about Fitch's money market fund ratings guidelines, please review the criteria referenced below.

To maintain the fund rating, Fitch seeks weekly portfolio holdings information from the fund administrator and conducts surveillance checks against its ratings guidelines. Surveillance data for this fund is available at www.fitchratings.com/FAM > Surveillance.

Additional information is available at 'www.fitchratings.com'. The ratings above were solicited by, or on behalf of, the issuer, and therefore, Fitch has been compensated for the provision of the ratings.

The sources of information used to assess this rating were the public domain and GSAM.

Applicable Criteria and Related Research:

--'Global Money Market Fund Rating Criteria', March 29, 2012;

--'U.S. Money Market Funds Sector Update: First-Quarter 2012, April 16, 2012.

Applicable Criteria and Related Research:

Global Money Market Fund Rating Criteria

http://www.fitchratings.com/creditdesk/reports/report_frame.cfm?rpt_id=674748

U.S. Money Market Funds Sector Update: First-Quarter 2012

http://www.fitchratings.com/creditdesk/reports/report_frame.cfm?rpt_id=676074

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Contacts:

Fitch Ratings
Brian Bertsch, [phone]
Media Relations, New York
[e-mail]
or
Primary Analyst:
Viktoria Baklanova, CFA, [phone]
Senior Director
Fitch, Inc.
One State Street Plaza
New York, NY 10004
or
Secondary Analyst:
Gwen Fink-Stone, [phone]
Associate Director
or
Committee Chairperson
Roger Schneider, [phone]
Senior Director