Fixed income

Industry groups are urging the Securities and Exchange Commission to reject a proposal from the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board to provide it with an additional $17 million in revenue annually by nearly doubling the amount of transaction fees it collects from dealers.

The company cited $1.6 billion of debt as of June 30.

With investors still trying to heal from the economic crisis that tore through the global economy, many are pouring their dollars into bond funds. But there are still challenges going forward and many need help navigating their options, said investment experts and fund managers from The Hartford at a luncheon in New York City Tuesday.

Build America Bonds have entered a world of their own. As the market braces for a blitz of taxable state and local government debt sales to close out the year, some experts expect the already-shaky correlations between BABs and other assets to break down.

Bond funds attract $5.31 billion of new money in the week.

RBC Capital Markets plans to announce Wednesday that Francisco Gonzalez has joined its municipal finance group to focus on large issues.

Build America Bond issuers could potentially go years without subsidy payments under the examination process the Internal Revenue Service is currently considering for them, bond attorneys meeting here warned last week.

Issuers that want to avoid disclosure mishaps — and possible federal enforcement action — should develop and closely follow policies as well as procedures that lay out who must review and sign off on their disclosure documents, Securities and Exchange Commission officials are stressing.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has postponed the municipal securities field hearing it planned to hold in Chicago on Nov. 16.

The company offers a way for advisors to gauge bond prices amid the retail investor market.

The Internal Revenue Service is kicking off the first round of audits of Build America Bonds and is asking issuers if any potentially related entities, such as pension plans, are buying their BABs, according to issuers and IRS officials.

Now is the time for a balanced approach to both equities and fixed income, MFS advises.

Center State Bank of Florida in Winter Haven seems to have entered the correspondent banking business at the perfect time.

The idea of a bond bubble keeps bubbling to the surface. The argument is sound. Interest rates are at all time lows. In the bizarro world of bonds this means that prices are at all-time highs. Meanwhile investors spooked by the stock markets are pouring into bonds the way they poured into, well, real estate before 2008 and technology before 2000.

After a short-lived period of inflows last week, tax-exempt money market funds experienced $1.81 billion of outflows and settled at $330.29 billion in total net assets for the week ending Oct. 11, according to the Money Fund Report, a service of iMoneyNet.com.

Fidelity has been underwriting more bonds than since the late 1980s.

Municipal market participants should not expect the Treasury Department to simply rubber-stamp the existing tax-exempt bond rules for issue price when it comes to Build America Bonds, a Treasury official told bond lawyers at a recent meeting.

In a move that “further enhances the fixed-income capabilities of the firm,” Highmark Capital Management has hired Jeffrey Klein as VP and portfolio manager for its Fixed Income Group, the Union Bank subsidiary said Tuesday.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch fended off a summer onslaught from Citi to hold on to the top spot among municipal bond underwriters through three quarters of the year.

Latin America and Asia are now an integral part of large funds’ bond and equity strategies.