Dan Seymour

Pacific Investment Management Co. is the latest company to jump into the municipal bond exchange-traded fund business.

The municipal bond industry is barreling toward its third $400 billion year.

Municipalities are preparing a decent slate consisting heavily of taxable bonds for sale this week following a holiday-shortened week with little activity.

For most of this year, the municipal bond market has been buttressed by cash coming out of hiding.

Financial Guaranty Insurance Corp. has been blocked from paying claims until it repairs its tattered finances under an order from New York State regulators.

Investors last week handed municipal bond mutual funds the puniest slug of cash in seven months, cementing the slower trend of new money flowing to the industry.

Just because money’s on the sidelines doesn’t mean it’s out of the game.

Investors in municipal credit need to make an important distinction between rated government bodies and unrated speculative credits, analysts from Fitch Ratings said at a conference yesterday.

Invesco Ltd. today launches an exchange-traded fund designed to track the performance of taxable Build America Bonds — a potentially transformative product that has helped galvanize public finance in 2009.

Municipal bond mutual funds last week continued to command new money at a pace that was still high but not quite as high as earlier this year.

Parents picking a charter school for their children want a school they can be confident will not close down. Bondholders want much the same thing.

Brightening economic prospects and improving liquidity helped lift the municipal bond market in the third quarter in spite of numerous credit concerns and the evisceration of the bond insurance industry, according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association’s quarterly report on municipal credit.

The worst economic downturn since the Great Depression has forced many state and local government budgets into a widely publicized vise.

The municipal bond market is in a standoff.Having undergone a crazy, screaming rally late in the summer and a sharp sell-off in the early fall, the municipal market hardly budged last week.

Investors bequeathed another more modest sum of cash to municipal bond mutual funds last week, offering further evidence that the blitz of new money barraging the industry has eased to a more moderate pace.

At least one demographic is yet to trumpet the end of the recession: local governments.

Ambac Financial Group Inc. left investors hanging yesterday.

The secret may be out. Municipal closed-end funds are unique and compelling because they give investors the opportunity to buy a basket of municipal bonds at a discount from market value.

October was a watershed month for the taxable municipal bond market. Nearly 37% of the $42.31 billion in municipal bonds floated in October were taxable, according to preliminary data from Thomson Reuters.

The cascade of cash washing into municipal bond mutual funds all year picked up again last week, suggesting the dip in new money in mid-October may have been a blip.