MuniLand

It’s an odd moment in muniland. There is an irregularity in the pricing of municipal bonds. Generally muni bonds have a lower yield than U.S. Treasuries because munis give investors a tax advantage. Investors use them to shield their investment income since coupon payments on municipal bonds from their state of residence are generally triple-tax-free — that is, they are not taxed at the local, state or federal level.

In this Bloomberg video Timothy Pynchon, a portfolio manager at Pioneer Investment Management, talks about how 30-year muni bonds are trading at 105 percent of the value of the 30-year Treasury. These bonds would usually trade at less than 100 percent of Treasuries because of their tax advantages.  This is a very unusual situation and would usually attract so-called “cross-over” buyers from other parts of the bond market. In the video, Cumberland Advisors’ David Kotok suggests that since U.S. Treasuries are mispriced (too expensive with low yields as a result of a flight to quality) it’s having a carry-over effect for long-dated municipal bonds. Basically the long end of the municipal bond market has moved away from its normal pricing relationships and is cheap relative to Treasuries.

Further:

Bloomberg: Colorado Refunds Transport Debt as Yield at Lowest Since 1994: Muni Credit

Bond Buyer: Muni Funds See Outflows for Fifth Straight Week

“What we had here was a wholly corrupt situation”

I’ve written several times that the potential bankruptcy of Jefferson County, Alabama is not the harbinger of a massive wave of defaults but rather a situation ridden with massive corruption. The corruption began in the late 1990s when sewer project contractors began overcharging. Many of them went to prison. The corruption was also a symbiotic dance between public officials and underwriters. It’s instructive to learn from what happened on this project so that public officials act with caution on the recommendations of underwriters. Wall Street’s preying upon municipal governments must stop. The Birmingham News has an excellent report today:

Christopher “Kit” Taylor, a financial consultant in Alexandria, Va. [and former chairman of the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board], who has followed the county’s sewer debt crisis since 2008, said there was corruption on both sides.

Lately a lot of big waves have washed over muniland. The national economy has slowed; the 2009 federal stimulus program to the states has ended; there have been loud headlines about bankruptcy cases in Jefferson County, Alabama and Central Falls, Rhode Island; and Standard & Poor’s downgraded the debt of the United States with potential effects on the borrowing ability of states and municipalities. It’s a laundry list of woes.

Considering all the strong forces facing muniland it’s interesting that the municipal bond market is still in such good shape and that interest rates on municipal bonds have remained low. There are two big reasons for this performance.

The first and biggest reason for smooth sailing is that muniland’s sister market, the U.S. Treasuries market, is having a tremendous rally as investors sail into the safe harbor of owning U.S. debt. Even though Standard & Poor’s downgraded U.S. debt to AA+ two weeks ago the U.S. Treasury market is both liquid and deep; it provides investors with security and a place to park assets. There has been so much demand for U.S. Treasuries that their yield (which moves in the opposite direction of the bond price) is nearing the ultra low yields of Japanese government debt. Bloomberg reports:

The theatrics in Congress concerning the debt ceiling, now in their seventh month, have sent increasingly strong shock waves throughout the U.S. and global financial systems. The debt ceiling is the legislatively-imposed limit for the nation to issue debt to fund its activities. It’s been stalled at the same level of $14.3 trillion since May 16. The U.S. Treasury has been scrambling to find extra monies, including borrowing internally from the federal government workers’ pension plans, so that they can continue to pay the nation’s obligations. They say the cash drawer is near empty.

The United States borrows or issues debt for 40 cents of every dollar that it spends — that is a lot to borrow. The federal government turns around and distributes this borrowed money, along with taxes collected, to Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries, states and local governments and defense contractors. It also returns some of it to bond holders as interest payments. The federal government is so massive that this flow of payments equals about 24% of the gross national product. If this flow stops, substantial parts of the economy will stop.

Organizations that oversee, or participate in, the financial system are rightly concerned. One positive benefit of these long, drawn-out Congressional deliberations is that there is time for extensive planning and analysis. Credit rating agencies have particularly been concerned with the downstream effect on state and local governments. Today Moody’s issued a press release that affirmed the strong AAA rating of 400 local governments while saying it would review the AAA rating of 162 other local governments (emphasis mine):

There has been a lot of discussion over the past few days about whether the United States deserves a triple-A rating. The weak and meandering attempts of the Congressional leadership and President Obama to reach a consensus on raising the debt ceiling has prompted this storm of confusion. The political theater is painful.

Most of the talk about ratings revolves around whether the level should be lowered one or more notches. But in The Telegraph today Ambrose Evans-Pritchard goes further and says it’s not really that important whether the United States retains a triple-A because the credit rating agencies don’t have the credibility to strip the rating to the world’s largest sovereign debt issuer (emphasis mine):

Yes, the US may be stripped of its AAA by Standard & Poor’s. A nice one-day story, but otherwise irrelevant. Global bond vigilantes are quite able to make their own judgement on the substantive default risk of the US. The rating agencies are out of their league on this one.

Happy days may be over in our 51st state. Joan Gralla of Reuters reports:

Puerto Rico’s credit rating might be cut due to its “deeply underfunded” pension system, Moody’s Investors Service said on Tuesday, in a reminder of one of the biggest threats to state and local finances.

Puerto Rico now is rated A3 by Moody’s; about $28 billion of debt issued by the Commonwealth was affected by the warning from the credit agency.

Puerto Rico’s financial problems are not only deep but long-standing. Moody’s cited years of over-estimating revenues, underestimating expenses and relying on deficit borrowing.