“It appears that every time we peel away this onion, there is another layer,” said Curtis D. Ishii, the senior investment officer for fixed income at Calpers, the large California pension fund. He added that investors were starting to realize that the pain in the credit market would persist for some time.

One measure of that stress is found in falling home prices. “To the extent that home prices keep spiraling down, the need for capital keeps increasing,” said Alejandro H. Aguilar, a portfolio manager at American Century Investments, the mutual fund company. Investors will be able to better estimate the size of their losses once it becomes clear how far prices will fall and when they will hit bottom.

As they wait for the housing market to recover, many investors have continued to rush to safe havens like Treasuries and other debts with a government backing or a short payoff, a sign that investors remain unwilling to invest in mortgages, even though lending standards have improved from the go-go days of the housing boom.

Money market funds, the short-term cash alternatives, grew to $2.9 trillion in June, up from $2.1 trillion a year ago, according to Crane Data. Those funds, in turn, have more than tripled their holdings of Treasuries and other government debt while reducing the share of their portfolios invested in somewhat riskier corporate notes.

Patrick Ledford, chief investment officer at the Reserve, one of the nation’s largest operators of money market funds, said some institutional investors had moved assets into government funds from broader money market funds to avoid exposure to commercial paper, which are short-term debts.

Some of the slack in the credit market has been taken up by the government chartered mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae. The three firms have securitized $692 billion in home mortgages through June, putting them on track to match, approximately, the $1.2 trillion they securitized in 2007, according to Inside Mortgage Finance, a financial trade publication.

But prices for these securities have fallen in the last two months, despite the backing of the government companies and initiatives by Congress and the Treasury to create a stronger government safety net for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.