MuniLand

This is a guest post from Joe Rosenblum, the director of Municipal Bond Credit Research at AllianceBernstein.

Is the municipal bond market on the verge of collapse? You might think so, given the blaring headlines about a few big disasters in the last year. But the truth is that poor decision making, not systemic issues, has caused the most serious problems.

Jefferson County, Alabama, and Vallejo, California, filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection. Receivers were appointed for Central Falls, Rhode Island, and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Stockton, California, is deferring debt-service payments (though bondholders continue to get paid from other sources) as it goes through a state-authorized mediation process with its creditors. And most recently, Detroit agreed with the State of Michigan on a shared fiscal oversight process to avoid bankruptcy.

There is no question that state and local governments are facing financial hardship as a result of the weak economic recovery and its impact on tax receipts. But this is not the first time local governments have been challenged or have defaulted on their debt or filed for bankruptcy protection.

In the 37 years since New York City’s brush with default in 1975, there have been a slew of other bankruptcies, defaults and near-defaults. Prominent among them were cases involving the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS); Cleveland, Ohio; Bridgeport, Connecticut; Yonkers, New York; Erie County, New York; and Orange County, California. All of them also grabbed headlines in their day.

The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board’s data platform for municipal bonds, EMMA, recently added credit ratings from Fitch and Standard & Poors to the system. This makes it really simple for investors to get a snapshot of the relative risk of one bond over another when doing research.

Typically the higher the rating, the lower the likelihood that a bond will default. New rules issued in 2008 for credit rating agencies required them to disclose the quantitative results of their ratings and show over time how many bonds defaulted in each rating category. This allows investors to map the performance of ratings over time and allows comparisons between agencies. The system looks at the occurrence of default 1, 3 and 10 years after the bond was issued.

The SEC views default statistics as a window into the accuracy of credit rating agencies’ analysis. Raters are required to publish this data, separated into bond classifications, on an annual basis on SEC Form NRSRO (Fitch’s 2011 NRSRO). I published the comparable data for municipal bonds from Standard & Poors in August. The two raters are broadly similar but not identical.

Insurers have “manageable” muniland risk

Meredith Whitney has made many assertions about muniland, but the only one that I had not heard from others before she stepped onto the national stage was her contention that insurance companies would be forced to sell their municipal bonds into a declining price spiral. She alleged this would collapse muniland, so it’s very interesting to see Moody’s assess the risk for insurance industry. From Property Casualty 360:

Property and casualty insurers remain the most exposed sector among financial institutions to volatility within the municipal-bond market, holding about $355 billion in municipal bonds, but the overall level of risk should be manageable, Moody’s says.

In a Special Comment, Moody’s says municipal bonds represent 60 percent of the industry’s equity capital base, as measured by policyholders’ surplus. This figure is down from the prior year, when the industry held about $370 billion in municipal bonds, representing about 70 percent of policyholders’ surplus.