The pace of tax-free bond sales could drop this year to a more than two-decade low.
Nic Querolo | Jan 12, 2021
(Bloomberg) -- America’s municipal-bond market is becoming less of a tax haven.
Interest rates have sunk so low that states and local governments have been flooding the market with bonds that aren’t tax-exempt, allowing them to revive a refinancing tactic that was stripped of its subsidies by President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax-cut law or sidestep federal rules on how the proceeds can be spent.
The volume of taxable municipal-debt sales more than doubled last year to about $140 billion, the most since the Obama administration’s Build America Bond program picked up part of the interest bills on state and local securities to stoke the economy after the recession. At the same time, tax-exempt bond sales declined about 8% to $315 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.