“ELIHU, WOULD YOU LOOFAH MY STRETCH MARKS?”

11/16/07

The 11/16/07 edition of The Wall Street Journal featured an article on page C1 arguing that the problems in the credit market have percolated down (one might think up, but that is another matter) into the municipal markets. According the to the article, the municipal bond market is experiencing problems because municipal bond insurers (Ambac, FGIC, etc.) have, in recent years, gotten into the business of insuring mortgage backed securities and CMOs. Bad move, obviously. The result has been the stocks’ of the insurers going into virtual free-fall and the credit ratings’ of the insurers coming into question. The ramifications for insured municipal bonds have been obvious.

This argument is good as far as it goes, but looks like another manifestation of the financial press and the financial “community” missing the bigger picture, as with their now faltering certainty that the problems in the mortgage markets are purely a “sub-prime” problem, the wrong-headedness of which has yet to become fully manifest. Yes, the insurers are having difficulty, and this is affecting the municipal market. But the consequences of the mortgage/real estate/credit market troubles for the municipal bond market are far broader.

Municipalities, of course, derive much of their revenue from property taxes, which have come under pressure as property values have fallen, and will continue to do so. The politicians, of course, will futz with the fuliginous formulae used to determine property taxes in order to keep revenue up as real estate values fall, but they will encounter strong, if not overwhelming, political resistance to doing so, especially in a weakening economy.

An even more direct, but less debilitating, impact of the mortgage/real estate problem on municipals is being, and will continue to be, felt through in real estate transfer taxes. In most municipalities, when one sells a house or other piece of property, one must pay a fee, usually several hundred or thousand dollars, to the municipality in which the property sold or property bought is located. The politicians have long found this an easy source of revenue; when people are in the heat of transactions involving several hundred thousand dollars, they barely notice a fee of perhaps a thousand or so. This fee has grown into a major source of municipal revenue. As the real estate market, er, slows down, revenue from this fee has been dramatically reduced. In Chicago, the drastic reduction in such fees has been cited as a major reason for Mayor Daley’s huge property, and other, tax increase. No matter what the Mayor says, the tax increase had little if anything to do with libraries, but I digress.

The big problem in the muni market is just beginning to be felt and, admittedly, is not part of the market’s immediate difficulties but will be far greater as it comes to fruition. This problem is public sector pensions. Our local government employees get perhaps the most generous pensions, on a percentage basis, of anyone in the country. Just about anyone, for instance, knows a cop, teacher, fireman, or just a local bureaucrat who has retired in his or her early 50s on an astronomical percentage (70%-80%) of his or her salary. One of the less shocking aspects of the Drew Peterson story is that the scrofulous Mr. Peterson is now receiving a pension of $72,000 per year after “retiring” at the age of 53 from the Bolingbrook Police Department. And, for those readers not familiar with the Chicago area, Bolingbrook, while not Mayberry, is not exactly tough duty for a cop. These huge and growing pension obligations are consuming an ever greater share of municipal budgets and thus of residents’ property tax bills. Back in the days when local government workers were somewhat underpaid relative to their private sector colleagues and a large percentage of the taxpayers had defined benefit pension plans, the taxpayers, while never happy about paying taxes, were less hesitant to pay real estate taxes to support rich defined benefit plans for municipal workers. But now that local government workers salaries’ are getting higher, pensions are getting ever richer, and the defined benefit pension plan is going the way of the pterodactyl in the private sector, property taxpayers are getting more and more resistant to paying their growing real estate bills when an ever growing portion of those bills is going to fund pension benefits of which they can only dream. This resistance has the potential to turn into outright rebellion as property tax bills continue to skyrocket, local services deteriorate, or both. While not being the immediate source of problems in the muni bond market, this is going to result in a crisis in municipal budgets in the very near future.

So, yes, the problems with muni bond insurers are having a negative impact on the muni market. But the impact of the credit market debacle on the muni market is far wider and deeper, and far larger problems are looming.