Far West

WASHINGTON ­— The Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday charged a Houston-based broker with engaging in unauthorized and unsuitable trading on behalf of two Florida municipalities, putting them at risk of losing millions of dollars while reaping more than $14 million in commissions.

SAN FRANCISCO — California Treasurer Bill Lockyer has appointed treasurer’s office veteran Barbara Tanaka as deputy executive director of the California Debt and Investment Advisory Commission.

Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. will complete the buyback of auction-rate securities from retail investors six months early under a settlement in principle reached with securities regulators in Missouri, Indiana, and Colorado announced late Monday.

SAN FRANCISCO — Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle is proposing to further restructure the state’s debt portfolio as part of a budget revision proposal that is primarily focused on dealing with a continued decline in tax receipts that is threatening to throw the budget out of balance.

WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service’s tax-exempt bond office plans to move full-speed ahead in 2010, now that it has cleared some administrative hurdles in incorporating large new stimulus programs into its workload and put to work newly trained hires that have nearly doubled the size of the TEB unit.

SAN FRANCISCO — The California Pollution Control Financing Authority has $590 million in new allocation for private-activity bond debt, after of a flurry of activity this month by the state’s debt limit committee to distribute almost $1.8 billion in volume cap before the end of the year.

Legislation passed by Congress last week will allow the Treasury Department to keep open through February its window for state and local government series securities, which municipal issuers purchase for refunding escrows to avoid earning arbitrage.

The amount of private-activity bonds that can be issued by state and local governments nationwide in 2010 will rise to almost $30.857 billion, an increase of 0.8%, according to new population figures released by the Census Bureau and the Internal Revenue Service's formula for state PAB volume caps.

WASHINGTON — The economy will continue to grow next year, municipal bond yields will rise — though not as much as Treasury yields — and the threat of inflation will remain low, according to most economists and market participants.

State and local governments will be able to buy and temporarily hold their tax-exempt bonds, including auction-rate securities, for another year without causing the bonds to be considered reissued for tax purposes, the Internal Revenue Service said yesterday.