There are massive fears out there. When Wachovia reported its quarterly earnings Wednesday, it revealed that core deposits had fallen by 8 percent during the quarter, sparked by a massive exit of commercial depositors after the failure of Washington Mutual.

Wachovia’s execs went on to say that this trend had turned around since the quarter ended.

How frightening. In a story I’m working on , too, I’m going to point out that money market mutual funds lost $200 billion in assets in just two recent weeks.

A run on funds? A run on the bank?

There are some huge responses, too, to these scary trends.

Fidelity Investments has decided that massive disclosure of information is the way to deal with investors’ fears.

Fidelity is now disclosing exactly what securities its money market mutual funds own to any customer who asks. The list is updated daily.

Think about the size of that disclosure. Fidelity has $440 billion in its money market funds.

As the largest mutual fund firm in the land, this gigantic asset management firm says it had to make a tradeoff, according to a spokeswoman: Protect its proprietary research that goes into selecting those securities or meet the concerns of its investors. It chose disclosure.

A free flow of information is the one way to dispel panic.

And so is knowledge. Consumers (or businesses) have insurance, up to $250,000 per depositor, at every one of the almost 8,500 banks and thrifts that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation oversees. We have the similar federal insurance at credit unions.

Stay below the limits and you’ll be fine.