Word: munis
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Munis don't offer the same sleep-at-night safety they used to," says Christopher Cordaro, a financial planner at Regent Atlantic in Morristown, NJ. Earlier this year, Cordaro, who has been a planner for 22 years, began advising clients for the first time in his career to trim their muni bond holdings. "Municipalities across the country are in rough shape." (See TIME's "25 People to Blame for the Financial Collapse...
...past two years, however, munis' predictability has been replaced by volatility. The bonds of state and local governments were among the worst performing sectors of the debt market in 2007, before falling off a cliff last year. The average muni bond fund lost 9.4% in 2008, and there were ten funds that lost more than...
...first, the losses did not really unnerve muni investors because they stemmed from a special problem relating to muni bond insurers, such as MBIA, which ran into financial difficulty. For that reason, many analysts and investors saw that early selloff in munis as a buying opportunity. The insurers may be in trouble, the thinking went, but municipalities were still able to raise taxes, or tolls, if they ever got into a crunch...
...Because of these issues, muni bonds don't seem particularly cheap even though munis now yield more than Treasuries. Indeed, Gary Strumeyer, head of capital markets at Bank of New York Mellon, says munis are no longer in the same rock-solid category as Treasuries, so it's not even a fair comparison. "Every investor needs to understand the many risks associated with purchasing muni bonds these days," he says...
...local parties joining 38 national parties in the legislative elections on April 9. "I think Partai Aceh will get the majority but am not sure by how much," predicts Humam. A local businessman expects it to be a landslide. "I think they could get as much as 75%," says Muni Hamid...