MuniLand

After similar challenges fought in 42 other states, Muniland’s two weakest credits – Illinois and Puerto Rico – are fighting difficult battles over pension reform. The pension struggles will have enormous effects on their creditworthiness.

Puerto Rico’s pension fund, which is dangerously close to insolvency, figured prominently in credit rater Moody’s analysis when it downgraded the commonwealth last December to Baa3, its lowest investment grade rating:

- Economic growth prospects remain weak after six years of recession and could be further dampened by the commonwealth’s efforts to control spending and reform its retirement system, both of which are needed to stabilize the commonwealth’s financial results. The lack of significant economic growth drivers and the commonwealth’s declining population have also reduced prospects for a strong economic recovery.

- Debt levels are very high and continue to grow.

- Lack of meaningful pension reform and no clear timetable to do so. Reform of the commonwealth’s severely underfunded retirement systems is needed to avoid asset depletion and future budget pressure.

Puerto Rico’s official leadership has promised pension reform, but it now appears stalled in the legislative assembly. Twitter is aflame with rumors of short whip counts and meetings at La Fortaleza (The Fortress), the official residence of the governor.

Numerous public pension plans across America are in horrendous shape. The employee plan of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, funded at an alleged 7 percent of assets, is functionally broke. Other public plans, like that of Charleston, West Virginia, have 24 percent of the assets needed to meet future promises to retirees.

There is little to no regulatory oversight of public pensions. And what little there is comes in a roundabout way. For example, the sanction that the Securities and Exchange Commission administered to the state of Illinois for not adequately disclosing to bond investors that it was not properly funding its system.

The core of the SEC complaint says:

The state omitted to disclose in preliminary and final official statements material information regarding the structural underfunding of its pension systems and the resulting risks to the state’s financial condition.

The state of Illinois was placed in the lower investment grade class last week when Standard & Poor’s downgraded the state to A- with a negative outlook.

Fitch

Moody’s

Standard & Poors

A  [negative watch]

A2  [Negative outlook]

A -  [Negative outlook]

On a market-based scale, the Fitch (A) and Moody’s (A2) ratings for Illinois are considered equivalent, while Standard & Poor’s is considered one notch lower. But more importantly, all the raters have a “negative watch or outlook” on the state. This means that it could be downgraded again. The ship is taking on water.

There are several reasons why raters view Illinois so negatively. The state’s spending is way out of line with its revenue and its deficit is about 25 percent of its annual budget. Unlike the federal government, Illinois cannot endlessly issue new bonds to cover annual shortfalls. Instead, the state simply delays paying its bills from year to year. From S&P’s rating action:

Now that three California towns have declared bankruptcy in the past few weeks, the mainstream media is abuzz with headlines of imminent doom for state and local governments. Adding fuel to the fire were Warren Buffett’s comments on Bloomberg TV about how cities may find it easier to declare bankruptcy after seeing others do it:

“The stigma has probably been reduced when you get very sizeable cities like Stockton or San Bernardino to do it,” Buffett, 81, said in an interview today on “In the Loop with Betty Liu” on Bloomberg Television. “The very fact they do it makes it more likely.”

He said the nation isn’t on the brink of hundreds of billions of dollars in defaults, as banking analyst Meredith Whitney predicted in 2010. “I don’t think we’re at the precipice,” Buffett said. “People will use the threat of bankruptcy to try and negotiate, particularly pension contracts, with their employees.”

Like U.S. Treasury debt, muniland securities have been hot, hot, hot. Investors have been piling into municipal bonds for about 16 consecutive months. At first, demand was driven by investors who were attracted to the high yields in the wake of Meredith Whitney’s predictions of default, which scared retail investors out of the market between November 2010 and February 2011. Demand then accelerated as the Federal Reserve kept interest rates at artificially low levels, driving investors out of Treasuries and into riskier assets. Steady municipal bond mutual-fund flows, coupled with the reinvestment of muniland proceeds into new bond issues, has also helped keep demand elevated.

On the supply side, municipal bond issuance in 2011 slowed to $295 billion, down 32 percent from 2010 and the lowest level since 2001. This lack of supply, along with massive demand, has covered over a lot of issuer weaknesses that would normally drive yields higher. Bloomberg reports:

“There’s a shortage of bonds out there,” said Paul Mansour, managing director at Hartford, Connecticut-based Conning, which oversees about $10 billion of municipal bonds. At the same time, “there’s a rush for yield, and it’s masking the differences” in issuers’ credit quality, he said.

Is the Ricketts family of Chicago bipolar? The patriarch, billionaire and Chicago Cubs owner Joe Ricketts, blasted onto the national stage yesterday, when the New York Times reported that his super PAC considered running an ad campaign entitled “The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama: The Ricketts Plan to End His Spending for Good.” His super PAC, the Ending Spending Action Fund, also lobbies against excessive federal spending and special-interest earmarks.

Meanwhile Ricketts’s son Tom, the general chairman of the Cubs, has been lobbying Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago and President Obama’s former chief of staff, for $150 million in tax revenues to renovate Wrigley Field, the home of his family’s Major League Baseball team. The irony of Joe Ricketts blasting the president for special-interest spending while his son grovels for taxpayer support to renovate his baseball stadium is enormous. The Ricketts family needs to meet around their kitchen table and get this matter worked out, because it makes both the father and son look clueless.

Greg Hinz of Crain’s Chicago Business has the local scoop:

Did the Ricketts family just knee-cap its own plan to rebuild Wrigley Field with a healthy dose of Chicago taxpayer cash?

In a series of decisions that may affect healthcare nationally, Illinois is tightening the noose on hospitals that claim tax-exempt, non-profit status. What began as the denial of a property tax exemption by the Champaign County Board of Review for one hospital system in 2002 has become a state-wide analysis of how much actual “charity care” hospitals are providing.

The immediate implication is that hospitals’ property tax exemptions could be revoked and vital revenues could be collected. However, this raises a broader structural question around the use of tax-exempt municipal bonds for entities that may be passive vehicles for for-profit activity.

Becker’s Hospital Review has the specifics:

[T]he Illinois Department of Revenue’s crackdown on Illinois non-profit hospital tax-exempt statuses came on the heels of an Illinois Supreme Court ruling from last year. In 2010, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that Provena Covenant Medical Center in Urbana, Ill., could not qualify for property tax-exempt status because it did not provide enough charity care to its community, although Provena argued that it provided millions of dollars in other free care and community benefits.

In the municipal bond market, one of the most insightful ways to examine a state is to look at how actively its bonds trade. Broker-dealers make money by trading, so naturally they go where the action is and commit market-making resources to those states. It’s generally true that the most populous states are the ones with the most traded bonds, but if we map the wealth of a state’s citizens to how often that state’s bonds trade, we get some interesting results. For example, New Jersey, which has only 2.8 percent of the national population but a high proportion of its wealthy citizens, might have the highest number of municipal bond owners as a percentage of state population.

The municipal bond market does not trade on an exchange but rather on “alternative trading systems” (ATS). These are systems where dealers post inventories of bonds to be aggregated. The largest of the retail ATS is Bonddesk, which does some excellent data analysis for both the municipal and corporate bond markets.

From Bonddesk’s December Transparency Report I pulled the data for these charts showing the seven most actively traded states’ bonds. Bonddesk uses “investor buys” data, which represents trades that end up in a retail investor’s account. In the bond markets there are often many trades between broker-dealers before the securities land in an investor’s account, so Bonddesk scrubs the data to show the real level of investor demand.

Illinois, the state in the weakest fiscal position, is planning two big bond deals in the first quarter of 2012. Next week they plan to raise $800 million in general obligation bonds to finance various transportation projects, followed by another $750 million later this winter in long-term bonds to fund construction projects.

Although the state is drowning in debt, unfunded pension liabilities and unpaid bills, these debt offerings are very restrained compared to the last two years when it borrowed to make obligatory payments to its heavily underwater pension system.

The State Treasurer, Dan Rutherford, had opposed issuing debt to fund pension obligations and managed to raise the alarm among his former colleagues in the Illinois legislature about the dangers of endless borrowing. Rutherford’s actions may have reversed the momentum of Illinois’s debt issuance. He is certainly the first fiscal officer that I have heard of who threatened to call the rating agencies to slow his state’s bond issuance.

Oh Illinois!

Illinois has massive problems: the state has more liabilities than assets, and the credit-default swap market says they are the number one state at risk for default (see chart above). The Bond Buyer ran an excellent story on how the liabilities of Illinois are rapidly increasing:

In a sign of Illinois’ ongoing fiscal challenges, its net assets deteriorated by $8.4 billion in fiscal 2010, pushing its deficit in that category of financial reporting up to a negative $37.9 billion, according to a new report from state auditor general William Holland.

The figure takes into account the state’s accounts payable that were $9.1 billion in fiscal 2010 and $55.1 billion of debt obligations, including outstanding bonds and pension obligations. The figures provide a wider view of a state’s overall long-term fiscal health than the snapshot provided by annual budget numbers.