Markets

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.

Municipal issuers this week will unveil several large deals — anchored by a $900 million Pennsylvania general obligation offering — on the heels of last week’s equally hefty post-holiday slate.

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

Most of The Bond Buyer’s weekly yield indexes increased this week as municipals came out of the holiday doldrums with losses outweighing gains, but with buyers returning to the market.

Tax-exempt money market funds rang in 2010 with $2.60 billion of inflows and total assets of $402.24 billion for the week ending Jan. 4, according to the Money Fund Report, a service of iMoneyNet.com.

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.

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.

Cash continues to run off the sidelines as investors lose patience with the minuscule returns offered by short-term safe havens.

Most of The Bond Buyer’s weekly indexes increased slightly during this holiday-shortened week, with the market largely inactive and firmly entrenched in the holiday doldrums.