Patrick McGee

Jefferies & Co. announced yesterday that it had snapped up 20-year veteran James McGinley to run its municipal securities markets group.

The possible bankruptcy of Ambac Financial Group is unlikely to affect policyholders of its bond insurer subsidiary Ambac Assurance Corp., Moody’s Investors Service said in a report released yesterday.

It’s been a rough few weeks for the stock market and an even worse period for the stocks of municipal bond insurers.

Janney Montgomery Scott LLC, a regional financial services firm, expanded its fixed-income team with five new hires this week, including a new director of institutional municipal sales.

Aiming to strengthen its specialty public finance business, Minneapolis-based Piper Jaffray & Co. continues to expand its coverage with four new hires and two new offices.

After receiving court approval two weeks ago, Ambac Assurance Corp. on Monday proceeded with its plan to pay billions of dollars to major financial institutions in exchange for terminating volatile structured-finance products.

As families struggle in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and recession, affordability has become a key concern when analyzing private higher education credits, according to a report from National Public Finance Guarantee Corp.

Wisconsin courts are not looking kindly on efforts to question the oversight of the state’s Office of the Commissioner of Insurance.

JPMorgan, consistently one of the top municipal bond underwriters, has been responding to increased appetite in the market recently by expanding its retail networks, marketing taxable munis for international distribution, and bulking up its public finance staff.

A state court on Wednesday allowed the Wisconsin insurance commissioner to proceed with his plan to allow bond insurer Ambac Assurance Corp. to imminently settle claims owed to major banks on structured finance product transactions.

With state and local governments struggling to find creative solutions to help with tight budgets, Wells Fargo & Co. recently expanded its government and institutional banking team with two key hires.

Yields in the municipal market declined by one to two basis points across the curve on Friday, but the strengthening was hardly impressive considering the much sharper gains among Treasuries.

Assured Guaranty Ltd., the only bond insurer with high enough ratings to be an active player in the municipal market, said debt guaranteed by below-investment-grade insurers should be sold in public auctions in order to improve the market’s perception about the product’s viability.

Ambac Financial Group Inc. Monday announced a major loss to shareholders in the first quarter as a result of new accounting rules that required the company to include off-balance sheet activities.

After spending more than a year and a half trying to launch the Municipal Infrastructure and Assurance Corp., executive vice president Richard ­Kolman Monday announced that he left the start-up bond insurer to join U.S. Bancorp, which is ­launching a muni underwriting business.

Mizuho Securities, the broker-dealer unit of Mizuho Financial Group, Japan’s third-largest bank, hired municipal industry veteran Jerry Rizzieri as head of fixed-income trading.

Atlanta-based Jackson Securities announced it tapped municipal industry veteran David A. Bernat to be managing director in its public finance group, where he will work to expand underwriting efforts in the Northeast.

Standard & Poor’s is proposing to separate and update its methodology for rating state credits, a move aimed at providing greater detail to clients and incorporating the idiosyncratic position states occupy within the municipal world.

Bond insurers Assured Guaranty Ltd. and MBIA Inc. each released first-quarter earnings Monday, and while their results were vastly dissimilar, they shared at least one thing in common — each company’s stock quickly tumbled afterward.

Ambac Financial Group Inc. late Tuesday estimated that it will report a first-quarter net loss between $650 million and $750 million, according to documents filed to the Securities and Exchange Commission.