Dan Seymour

Municipal bonds have notched a good week as governments’ willingness to refrain from borrowing means investors with money to spend mostly have to chase existing bonds in the secondary market.

According to survey results released Wednesday, when RBC Capital Markets asked 100 state and local government experts at The Bond Buyer Texas Public Finance Conference last month whether they would buy municipal bonds for their own portfolios, all 100 said yes.

The pressure on municipal bond mutual funds is fading rapidly as a much less panicked tone in the state and local government debt market has stemmed the exodus of cash from the industry.

The tide of cash washing out of municipal bond mutual funds continued to ebb last week as more and more of the “hot money” that flooded the industry the last two years seems to have escaped by now.

The Obama administration’s proposal to renew the Build America Bond program may suffer from the same problem it had the first time around, when the federal government didn’t think municipalities would use BABs that much.

As the expiration of the Build America Bond program loomed last year, the market was wracked with uncertainty about just who was going to buy long-term tax-exempt bonds. Thanks to the drought of new municipal bond issuance in 2011, the market is still wondering.

Municipal bond mutual fund outflows continued to subside last week from recent record-setting levels as the cash most prone to panic appears to have left by now.

The risk-management and trade analytics service announced the launch Tuesday of a service evaluating the illiquidity of municipal bond mutual fund holdings.

Municipal bond mutual fund outflows moderated last week as a nervous market seemed better able to absorb the relentless fund selling.

Climbing the wall of expiring bank guarantees on municipal debt in the coming months may not turn out to be as daunting as anticipated.

Investors established a new record for withdrawals from municipal bond mutual funds last week as headline risk continued to chase people from state and local government debt funds.

The sophisticated investor in retail municipal bonds has ­remained calm the past few months even as mutual funds have dumped state and local ­government debt by the truckload.

Most municipal bond exchange-traded funds in the fourth quarter performed noticeably worse than the indexes they were designed to track. Or, depending on your perspective, they performed noticeably better.

Investors kept pulling their cash from municipal bond mutual funds at a record pace last week as frightened money continued to flee the market.

No sooner did Build America Bonds become orphaned than they caught fire.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch in 2010 reclaimed its title as the top underwriter of municipal debt, thanks mainly to its dominance in the competitive market.

The tax-free money market fund industry continues to shrink rapidly, squeezing what had been a major source of short-term credit for municipalities and arguably leading to higher borrowing costs for state and local governments.

Investors continued to ferry cash out of their municipal bond mutual funds at historic rates last week as a tumultuous sell-off sowed fear among buyers.

A change in the methodology the Federal Reserve uses to measure who owns municipal bonds has masked the growth in foreign ownership of state and local government debt.

The story in the municipal bond market this month has been bleak. The story in the municipal bond exchange-traded fund ­market has been even bleaker.