Dan Seymour

Stock market volatility is not the top item on the list of things municipal bond investors worry about.

Why try to match the market when you can beat it?

The pace of new money flooding into municipal bond mutual funds appears to be picking up again after a lull.

A little more than a month after one rating agency issued a paper promising not to downgrade a municipality’s credit if its officials talk about bankruptcy, Fitch Ratings yesterday distributed a report saying just the opposite.

Investors last week handed municipal bond mutual funds the puniest slug of cash in nine months as the cascade of new money continues to moderate.

Three current and former executives of CDR Financial Products will stand trial next February for their alleged use of rigged bids and deception to rip off state and local governments.

UBS Global Asset Management is surrendering one of its municipal bond closed-end funds following a coup by activist shareholders.

Cash hurts.That painful truth is a primary pillar supporting municipal bonds today.

Standard & Poor’s downgrade of California last week raises a crucial question: does the Golden State’s debt at some point become no longer appropriate for conservative retail investors?

Matt Dalton is willing to buy the debt of a bankrupt borrower — and he can’t find any for sale at a suitable price.

Only in municipal bonds.Matt Dalton is willing to buy the debt of a bankrupt borrower — and he can’t find any for sale at a suitable price.

Among the many metamorphoses the advent of taxable Build America Bonds was anticipated to induce in the tax-exempt municipal bond market, one of the most important was the flattening of the yield curve.

Long-term municipal bonds have demonstrated unusual resilience against the market’s walloping of Treasury bonds in the last six weeks.

After breaking every record for garnering new money from investors in 2009, municipal bond mutual funds kicked off 2010 by taking in still more.

BlackRock Friday threw a new type of product into the mix in the rapidly growing and evolving municipal bond exchange-traded fund industry.

Financial Guaranty Insurance Corp. met the regulatory deadline to submit a proposal to repair its battered finances.

As if municipal bond closed-end funds needed any more help, the year-end tax selling that customarily plagues the industry every December took the year off in 2009.

What do you get when you mix a protracted recession with a series of overly optimistic projections and a credit guarantee from a borderline insolvent bond insurer?

Municipalities sold the second-heaviest slate of debt in the history of public finance in 2009, boosted by federal legislation that tapped into a reservoir of demand for state and local government credit in other markets.

In the first week of 2009, nobody had heard of Build America Bonds. In the first week of 2010, they rule the municipal bond market.