Markets

Nearly all The Bond Buyer’s weekly yield indexes declined this week amid fairly light trading activity in the secondary market and ahead of tomorrow’s Thanksgiving Day holiday.

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.

With the Thanksgiving holiday on the menu, issuers, underwriters, and bankers have very few deals scheduled to take place during the shortened trading week.

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

Most of The Bond Buyer’s yield indexes declined this week, as the municipal market grew firmer over the past several sessions in the last full week of activity prior to the Thanksgiving holiday.

Outflows of $2 billion caused tax-exempt money market funds to decline to $409.57 billion for the week ending Nov. 16, according to the Money Fund Report, a service of iMoneyNet.com.

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.

Two deals over $1 billion — one in New York and one in California — will vie for investors’ attention this week as the largest being priced, as activity begins to slow down ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday next week.