Muni Think

Congress must extend the expansion of the bank-qualified provision and the 2% de minimis rule to help issuers raise money at reasonable costs.

Things get stranger and stranger. Consequences are serious. Two key areas are MSRB Rule G-23 and the legislation approved by the Senate Banking Committee that includes plans for regulating financial advisers. Make no mistake — issuer protections are at stake.

President Obama and Congress need to appoint U.S. Sen. George Voinovich to chair a bipartisan, intergovernmental commission to assess and make recommendations on the credit crisis confronting the nation’s state and local governments.

Few, if any, municipal finance professionals were predicting at the beginning of last year that 2009 would be one of the strongest years ever for municipal debt issuance.

In the wake of the near-meltdown of the global financial markets, it can be tempting to conclude that the losses faced by municipal issuers and investors in recent years were unavoidable. In a maelstrom, all ships are at risk.

Municipal budgets continue to exhibit severe stress, and public officials are being pressed to come up with solutions that create savings from both traditional and non-traditional sources. The low-hanging fruit has generally been exhausted, and incremental silver-bullet solutions are hard to find.

Andrew Ackerman’s Jan. 13 article “Climate Disclosure Sought” accurately reflects the current state of public debate on disclosure of financial risk to investors in tax-exempt bonds that support new and existing coal-fired electric generation plants. It is a debate fraught with paradox and risk.

Meaningful regulatory reform must ensure that large institutions receive neither explicit nor implicit protection from the federal government. The Regional Bond Dealers Association strongly supports comprehensive financial regulatory reform, especially the legislative efforts to end the taxpayer bailout of financial institutions deemed “too big to fail.”

It is hypocritical for John White to be so disparaging of broker-dealers (“Regulating Muni FAs: A Solution in Search of a Problem,” Dec. 7, 2009) when his firm, PFM Group, is so closely aligned with the very dealers he criticizes.

The media is on fire with pundits and purveyors of gold hawking the yellow stuff at every opportunity.