Markets Magazine
The Crazy Junk-Muni Market Makes More Sense Than Ever
There will always be risky projects looking for money, but today’s investors are better equipped to handle losses.
Illustrator: Matt Chase for Bloomberg Markets
This article is for subscribers only.
When I hear complaints about some of the riskier municipal bond deals in the market today, I think back to my “map talk” in 1999.
I was the lunchtime speaker at the National Federation of Municipal Analysts advanced seminar on high-yield bonds in Santa Monica, Calif. Without any props or projections, I took the roomful of bankers, analysts, and investors on a virtual tour of many of the interesting—even fabulous—transactions I’d written about in Grant’s Municipal Bond Observer over the previous few years.