Muni Think

Michael Decker, managing director and co-head of municipal securities at SIFMA, sets forth his case for not federally regulating underwriters when they provide what he calls “advice” to municipal securities issuers.

Like a snowball rolling down a hill, the idea of applying a fiduciary duty standard to broker-dealers is gaining momentum.

A troubling series of proposals has emerged in the U.S. Senate debate over changes to federal regulation of the financial markets.

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.