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Fitch Ratings affirmed the A-minus rating of Guam business privilege tax bonds ahead of a $404.9 million refunding.

Top-shelf municipal bonds closed steady on Wednesday as Detroit returned to the market with its first post-bankruptcy bond sale. The city paid a steep penalty on its transaction as sturdy bondholder protections and an A rating from S&P only went so far in offsetting market acceptance of a name tainted by its Chapter 9 case that resulted in deep bondholder haircuts.

Government

Moody’s Investors Service stripped the limited tax general obligation bonds of the Cook County Community School District 147 in Dixmoor, Illinois of their investment grade rating.

The Missouri Development Finance Board signed off on tax credit allocations to support the state-backed financing plan for a new $1 billion St. Louis Rams professional football stadium.

New Jersey’s already low A2 rating could slip more if the state Supreme Court rules in favor of retirees in a pending case, according to Moody’s Investors Service.

California lawmakers began consideration of several bond-related propositions aimed at raising infrastructure revenue.

The President of the Government Development Bank for Puerto Rico sent a letter to representatives saying that the P.R. Public Finance Corp. nonpayment on Aug. 1 was not a default.

"Adventures in MuniLand," published by Cumberland Advisors Publishing and written by three of its senior staffers, is a 369-page guide that helps readers understand the changes that market endured during the seven-year period from the end of 2007 and the following financial crisis.

The municipal bond tax exemption saved state and local government borrowers about $715 billion in debt service expenses from 2000 to 2014, according to a white paper issued by the International City/County Management Association and the Government Finance Officers Association.

Standard & Poor's Ratings Services said it raised its long-term and underlying ratings on Madison County School District, Miss.' existing general obligation bonds and limited tax notes to AA from AA-minus.

Markets reporter Aaron Weitzman talks with Tom Kozlik, managing director and municipal strategist at PNC Capital Markets about the trends he saw in the municipal market during the first half of the year and how he thinks the rest of the year will pan out. Will refunding volume start to drop? And if so, will new-money pick up the slack?WEITZMAN: Let's start off with the re-fundings. Can you talk a little bit how that has impacted overall issuance so far this year?KOZLIK: Yes, re-fundings have been one of the real big stories for the first half of 2015. It is really driven overall volume levels, not unexpectedly really. We thought that interest rates were going to stay around the levels that they've been at and we really expected refunding levels to be coming in as strong as they have been.WEITZMAN: You see refunding is kind of drying up as we push on through towards the end of the year. I know that everyone is expecting the rates to rise. Can you speak a little bit about that?KOZLIK: Yes, the PNC Chief Economist Stu Hoffmann still thinks that there's a rate hike that's going to happen at the end of this month. The second hike was expecting to happen in December of this year. It's pushing that back a little bit to the first quarter of 2016, but our chief economist is still expecting that the rates are going to-- There was going to be a rate hike. That doesn't necessarily mean that re-fundings are going to dry up though. That's one of things to keep in mind, especially if the short-term rates rise and a yield curve flattens. In a situation like that, we could still see a good amount of re-fundings.WEITZMAN: New money has been down for most of the year, but the past couple of weeks, a month or two, ticked up a little bit. What can you attribute to the lack of new money so far this year and how do you see new money playing out for the rest of the year?KOZLIK: New money is an interesting story. I thought that for the past year or two, that new money was going to not be anywhere near what we saw in previous years, and the reason for that is because credit conditions aren't great. A lot of issuers are sitting back, they're looking at their balance sheets, they don't want to add more fixed costs. One of the things that they're doing is they're thinking once, twice, three times about adding more fixed costs and one of the things that they can do in order to keep those to a minimum is to not sell out in more debt.WEITZMAN: Okay. Now, something that we haven't talked about yet so far, kind of looking to your crystal ball if you will, going head for the rest of the year, what are you going to be keeping your eye on? Are you going to see any trends that people haven't talked about a lot, or kind of, what do you forecast I guess for the year, for the rest of the year?KOZLIK: The big thing that I'm watching for, especially credit-wise, is while revenues have ticked up a little bit, there's still nowhere near the pace that we saw pre-2008, pre-2009, or before the recession. On top of that, there are a lot of issuers who still kind of don't realize that there's a new fiscal reality, that they've got a budget too and that they've got of react to. Quarter after quarter and year after year for that matter, there's been a good amount of credit deterioration. We're going to watch, first of all, to see if there's credit deterioration that continues, and second of all, at some point, we need to see if issuers are preparing for the next recession because at some point, there's going to be a next recession. We are near or at the top of the business cycle here and, from my perspective, credit conditions for state local governments and other municipal issuers really aren't all that prepared for that next downturn.

Fitch Ratings revised New Jersey's outlook to stable from negative saying that "the state's near-term budget risks have abated."

Issuers in the Southeast sold $41.56 billion of bonds in the first half of 2015, an 85% increase in year-over-year volume fueled by refundings and a slight uptick in new-money sales.

The economy continues to make progress, but it wasn't sufficient to warrant an interest rate hike, according to the minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee's July 28-29 meeting, released Wednesday, which also showed that one member was ready to vote for an increase, but would wait for more data.

Prices of top-shelf municipal bonds were weaker at mid-session, traders said, as the city of Detroit returned to the market with its first post-bankruptcy bond sale.

Robert Steven Kaplan was appointed president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, the Bank announced Monday.

Standard & Poor's Ratings Services said it lowered its long-term rating to D from CC on Boynton Beach, Fla.'s series 2012A tax-exempt and 2012B taxable revenue bonds, issued for and supported by the Charter School of Boynton Beach.

Moody's Investors Service said it has upgraded the city of East Providence, R.I.'s general obligation rating to A2 from Baa1, affecting approximately $17 million in outstanding parity debt; the outlook is stable