Markets

Issuers from the Northeast will take the spotlight as the New York City Transitional Finance Authority and Pennsylvania each plan to sell at least $1 billion this week in the heaviest calendar of municipal bond deals in more than a month.

Municipal bond mutual funds continued to garner cash last week despite the flight from risk that has driven most of the flows this month.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has accused the former manager of two Schroders Investment Management municipal bond mutual funds of tipping his family members about impending distress to the funds and urging them to sell their shares.

State Street Global Advisors and Nuveen Investments launched an exchange-traded fund tracking Build America Bonds yesterday as investment vehicles devoted to taxable municipal debt continue to proliferate.

Tax-exempt money market funds had inflows of $545.7 million and settled with $357.2 billion in total assets for the week ending May 10, while the average seven-day simple yield dropped one basis point to 0.03%, according to the Money Fund Report, a service of iMoneyNet.com.

Some municipal bonds have rallied significantly since Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings last month overhauled their systems for assigning ratings to state and local government credits — effectively upgrading almost the entire universe of muni bonds.

The Bond Buyer’s weekly yield indexes increased slightly this week amid muted interest in the secondary market.

Retail investors shrugged off the panic plaguing most of the world’s financial markets last week and poured more cash into municipal bond mutual funds.

The primary market is expected to include a handful of large deals that run the gamut from long-term, fixed-rate, tax-exempt offerings in various sectors to short-term, floating-rate, and taxable issues that are part of an estimated $7.56 billion of new volume anticipated for pricing this week, according to Ipreo LLC and The Bond Buyer.