Jefferies & Co. Brings Aboard Danford Peterson From PIMCO

Goldman, Sachs & Co. veteran ­Danford Peterson joined the municipal securities trading group at Jefferies & Co. this week, the investment bank announced Monday.

Peterson will be managing director based in New York City. He will report to James McGinley, who has headed the municipal markets team since joining the group from Barclays Capital in June 2010.

“His considerable product experience, solid relationships and proven track record will complement our existing team as we continue to build our municipal securities business to better serve our clients,” McGinley said of Peterson.

Peterson joins Jefferies from Pacific Investment Management Co., where he came aboard last year as a senior vice president and portfolio manager with a focus on muni bonds.

Peterson’s duties there included managing PIMCO’s Build America Bond Strategy Fund, which was launched in September.

He is best known for his 11-year tenure at Goldman, where he spent seven years in the municipal bond trading group and four years in the public finance banking area.

Peterson departed Goldman as a vice president on the muni trading desk.

Jefferies, a global securities and investment banking group headquartered in New York City, was the lead manager on 88 deals totaling $5.1 billion last year, ranking it the 14th largest, according to Thomson Reuters.

Jefferies is currently ranked as the 16th largest senior-managing underwriter in 2011.

The firm’s municipal securities group is comprised of more than 100 professionals focused on the banking, sales and trading of municipal securities, according to a press release.

Two other recent additions were announced in September: Todd Carnevale was tapped to be head of municipal yield trading, and Kurt Ahrens joined as a vice president for muni trading.

Carnevale joined the investment bank from Barclays after having spent 24 years with Lehman Brothers, where he focused on high-yield and distressed municipal bonds.

Ahrens was hired from JPMorgan, where he spent seven years as an institutional bond trader and managed the municipal group’s relationship with the bank’s middle-market  and private wealth divisions.

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