Spotlight: Municipal Strategy Report - February 2012

"Loonie Tunes?" 
In February's Municipal Strategy Report we salute the Canadians for their successful Yankee bond issue in early February, their budgetary control, and their superior economic performance.  We speculate that the U.S. would be better off if we abandoned hockey and focused on getting the right things done in Washington.

Municipal Strategy Report - February 2012 (PDF) »

As a resource rich country, Canada, along with Australia, New Zealand and the Scandinavian countries, among others, have continued to feed the appetites of global economic powerhouses like China, India and Brazil.  In limiting the economic fallout, our friends to the north have spared themselves an escalation in their budgetary problems.  Well played. 

Publication Highlights:

• A variety of New York State related information as part of this month's "geographic focus."

• Detailed municipal default data over the last 3+ years for the true data lover.  As we have said before: "The data does not provide any indications that predict catastrophic municipal defaults..."

• An updated economic and interest rate forecast using our Bayesian Vector Autoregression (BVAR) and Loop Simultaneous Equations (LSE) models.  Bottom line: 2012 is very likely to best 2011 by a small, but noticeable, amount.

View Charts of the Month » 

Spotlight: Conference Call: Municipal Market Outlook 2012

CEO Jim Reynolds and Chris Mier, Chief Strategist, conducted the firm's fourth annual "Outlook for Municipal Bonds" conference call on Thursday, January 19, 2012. 

To hear a playback of the call along with the presentation slides, please call Ivan Gulich at (312) 913-2204, who will direct you to the link. 
Presentation Slides »

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