Municipal New Issuance: Last weeks negotiated calendar totaled to just over $5.8 billion. The largest deal of the week, which AmeriVet participated in the Selling-Group, was the $1.5 billion New York City GO issue which garnered the most attention. The next largest deal of the week was the $565 million Hurst Euless Bedford Independent School District issue. The State of Wisconsin also issued last week to the sum of $489 million.

Municipal Secondary Trading: Secondary trading for the week totaled to about $34 billion with 55% of the trades being dealer sells. According to Bloomberg, clients put up roughly $4.59 billion up for the bid with last Tuesday having the largest amount of bids-wanted with $1.3 billion up for the bid.

Municipal Spreads: Last week saw muni yields fell for the first time for the month of February this year with 10-year notes falling by just 2 basis points to finish the week off at 2.52%. Although we did see muni yields fall, we continue to see munis continue to be rich compared to Treasuries as the muni to Treasury ratio did rise this past week to 60.41% compared to 59.97% from the prior week. The muni curve did flatten slightly over the last week by 0.2 basis points to end the week at 88 basis points.

Municipal bond mutual funds saw a small inflow this past week as data from LSEG Lipper Global Fund Flows data indicates investors added about $72 million to municipal bond funds. This follows the prior week’s outflow of $11 million and this inflow ends the three straight weeks of outflows.

For the majority of the month of February, we were looking at another monthly loss which would have been the fourth in a row for February. However, with the extra day, munis were able to rally by pushing yields lower by a basis point or two across the curve. This rally pushed February returns into the green with  a return of .13%. This was the first positive gain during the month of February since 2020. Despite this small marginal gain, munis were still able to outperform Treasuries by 144 basis points. Munis maturing in 20 years saw the largest monthly gain of .24% while the munis maturing in 7 years saw the smallest return of just .04%.

Municipal Supply: The negotiated calendar for the first week of March will have an expected volume of roughly $6.4 billion. The largest deals of the week are the $997 million the Regents of the University of California issue, followed by the $878 million New York City Municipal Water Finance Authority issuance which AmeriVet will be participating in the the Selling-Group. The President and Fellows of Harvard College will also be planning on selling $750 million in taxable bonds using a corporate cusip. AmeriVet will also be a Selling-Group-Member on the $14.7 million Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development issue. Since the start of the year new, issue supply is up over 40% from the same time period a year ago due to the decrease in borrowing costs.