Visual Guide to Municipal Bonds offers step-by-step guidance to the nature and diversity of municipal securities credit structures. This valuable guide demonstrates the dependability of the overwhelming majority of municipal securities, and points out particular market sectors that may yield greater rewards, but also present greater risks.
Introduction:
The municipal securities market is widely misunder-stood by commentators, investors, issuers, regulators, legislators, and even many market professionals. In reality, the market consists of two vastly different markets. One market is traditional municipal securities that are very sound and are secure, with extremely low default risks. The other is a market of readily identifiable, much riskier securities dependent primarily upon private performance (profit and nonprofit) or issued for start-up or rapidly expanding projects. That second municipal securities market deserves signifi antly greater attention from everyone.
Municipal securities are issued by state and local governments. Despite considerable negative publicity in the media and from certain pundits, traditional municipal securities are safe. That is, they have evidenced extremely low payment default rates historically. Further, despite unarguable fiscal stress resulting from the financial crisis and from pension and other employee benefit costs, a key feature of traditional municipal securities for essential purposes is that the securities structures are strongly protective of investors. The net result is that those state and local government stresses will become burdens on the taxpayers long before they will harm investors. Indeed, it is highly unlikely that investors will suffer in the case of the traditional municipal securities. There are, however, certain municipal securities that warrant a closer look and greater rewards. This book seeks to identify many of those for you.
Contents:
- Basic Information Resources
- General Obligation Securities
- General Fund and Other Municipal Securities
- Revenue Securities
- Greater Rewards and Greater Risks
- Considerations When Buying
- Municipal Securities Pricing and Trading
- Tax Exemption of Municipal Securities
- Understanding Expert Work Products
- Municipal Securities Regulation
- Investor Questions and Answers (Q&As)