NEW YORK - Phil Fischer, for decades one of the predominant voices in public finance, is retiring.
The head of municipal research at Bank of America Merrill Lynch is stepping down at the end of the year. Effective Jan. 4, he will be replaced by John Hallacy, a banker in the municipals division at the company and until recently chairman of the Municipal Analysts Group of New York.
Fischer joined Merrill Lynch in 1987. He received the National Federation of Municipal Analysts Award of Excellence in 2003, and has earned Institutional Investor Magazine’s number-one municipal strategist award numerous times.
“I have a fine bunch of colleagues and had a great career,” Fischer said. “I just think it’s time to take it down a little bit.”
Fischer said he plans to spend more time writing.
Readers of Fischer’s weekly municipal strategy reports — which are often data-heavy and analyze things like negative arbitrage, fund flows, issuer credit quality, and taxable municipal spreads over corporate bonds — may be surprised to learn what kind of writing he means.
Under the name P.J. Fischer, Fischer has published two science fiction/fantasy novels — “Julia and the Dream Maker” and “Green Eyes in the Amazon.”
Published respectively in 2003 and 2009, the novels span such topics as theology, evolution, and bioethics.
Before joining Merrill Lynch, Fischer was a senior research analyst at Citicorp Investment Bank and Salomon Brothers.
When asked how the municipal market has changed since he started out, he replied: “There’s hardly any comparison.”
The “information revolution” is reshaping the way people learn about municipal bonds, he said. All the procedures and transactions in the market are adjusting accordingly, he said.
Fischer grew up in Salem, Ore. He studied chemical engineering at Oregon State University and earned a Ph.D in finance from the University of Oregon.
Fischer’s successor, Hallacy, is not new to the company’s research division.
A 30-year veteran of the municipal industry, Hallacy joined Merrill’s research department in 1990.
He spent more than 14 years managing Merrill’s municipal credit research team and was a tax-backed and general municipals research analyst.
Hallacy ranked first in Institutional Investor’s All-America Fixed-Income research team survey for eight straight years. He was the recipient of NFMA’s Award of Excellence two years before Fischer.
He chaired MAGNY from 2008 to 2009 and is a former head of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association municipal credit research committee.
He left the company briefly in 2004 to take a position as managing director of the global tax-backed underwriting unit at MBIA.
Hallacy returned to Merrill as a banker in 2005. He previously worked for Standard & Poor’s and Financial Guaranty Insurance Corp.
Hallacy could not comment on his new role because of a “transition period” from banking to research.
