Buy side

While municipals have outperformed USTs on the whole in 2024, they will close December with losses. How taxables perform in early 2025 coupled with macroeconomic and Washington policy uncertainty have municipal market participants on edge for what lies ahead.

The muni market saw $507.585 billion of debt issued in 2024, up 31.8% from $385.061 in 2023. This surpasses the previous record of $484.601 billion in 2020 by more than $20 billion, per LSEG data.

Both IG and HY indices will likely end this year richer versus USTs and their benchmarks, "leaving very little cushion to absorb rate volatility," said Barclays strategist Mikhail Foux.

While Friday's muni session was muted, the damage of a volatile UST market, paired with low new-issue supply and year-end positioning, has weighed on the asset class in December.

High-yield funds saw outflows of $413.6 million compared to the previous week's outflows of $71 million.

Munis "continued their slide" last week as yields rose an average of 23 basis points across the curve as the Fed Chairman Jerome Powell signaled the Fed will take a "more cautious approach" on interest rate cuts next year, said Jason Wong, vice president of municipals at AmeriVet Securities.

"Munis are grappling with a storm of uncertainty," said James Pruskowski, chief investment officer at 16Rock Asset Management.

It's hard enough convincing local governments to spend money on cyber insurance that covers ransomware attacks, said Omid Rahmani, public finance cybersecurity lead at Fitch Ratings. The new and very specific threat of a hacked financing process, is "absolutely" underappreciated by the public finance industry.

As the market prepares for 2025, there's a lot of uncertainty around what the new administration will mean for the macroeconomic environment and interest rates, the latter of which may be impacted by policy around the deficit, said Steve Shutz, portfolio manager and director of tax-exempt fixed income at Brown Advisory.

Despite the approval, hurdles remain, including the team's request for more money from the government, which they say delayed approval of the bonds, leading to additional construction costs.

With investors now anticipating Wednesday's expected rate cut may be the last one for a while, "an overall bullish paradigm has been seriously weakened," noted Matt Fabian, a partner at Municipal Market Analytics, Inc.

Supply falls ahead of the final Federal Open Market Committee meeting of 2024 and the holidays but issuance still breaks records. The lighter calendar should provide support for the secondary market in the final weeks of the year.

The face amount of munis outstanding rose to $4.171 trillion, a 0.8% increase from Q2 2024 and 2.9% from Q3 2023, according to the latest Fed data.

Something less than $400 million of the bonds will be taxable bonds.

Muni mutual funds saw outflows after 23 weeks of inflows as LSEG Lipper reported investors pulled $316.2 million for the week ending Dec. 11. High-yield municipal bond funds, though, saw inflows of $192.3 million.

Most on the Street expect issuance to come in around $500 billion, but a few think volume will be much higher, primarily because of potential changes to the tax exemption. Most firms expect refunding volumes to also grow in 2025.

Wednesday marks the 10-year anniversary of Detroit's exit from bankruptcy. Its Chapter 9 declaration in 2013 was the largest municipal bankruptcy in the U.S.

"With strong demand, rate cuts and favorable technicals, the muni market — outside of an unexpected shock — is set up to perform well over the next couple of months," said Daryl Clements, a municipal portfolio manager at AllianceBernstein.

Munis are in the black so far this month, with the Bloomberg Municipal Index at +0.33% in December and +2.88% year-to-date, the high-yield index is at +0.27% in December and returning 8.41% in 2024, while taxable munis are returning 0.43% so far this month and 4.58% in 2024.

Principal Street Partners will acquire the bankrupt firm that specialized in high-yield bonds issued for senior living facilities and charter schools.