Muni Bond Insurance Buffett Called Dangerous Delivers Comeback

(Bloomberg) -- Municipal bond insurance is showing signs of renewal this year as new providers respond to demand from low-rated borrowers whose costs have increased three times as fast as for issuers with top credit grades.

Leading guarantee firms, including Ambac Financial Group Inc. and MBIA Inc. forfeited top credit ratings last year after losses related to subprime mortgage-backed securities. The amount of insured new issues plunged 64 percent in 2008 as the biggest bond-insurance firms wrote down at least $21.3 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

An early contender to replace them, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Assurance Corp., was downgraded to Aa1 by Moody’s Investors Service in April. The billionaire investor in February called tax-exempt bond guarantees “a dangerous business.” His firm insured $3.3 billion in issues last year, ranking third in the industry.

Buffett’s warning isn’t stopping Macquarie Group Ltd., Australia’s biggest securities firm, from backing a new guarantor: Municipal and Infrastructure Assurance Corp. plans to sell its first policy by July, said Richard E. Kolman, the New York-based startup’s executive vice chairman.

“It is surprising to find that municipal bond insurance is anything but moribund in the early going in 2009,” wrote Philip J. Fischer, a Merrill Lynch & Co. municipal strategist in New York, in an April 6 report.

Carrie Gray, a spokeswoman for Merrill Lynch, declined to make Fischer available for comment.

Diversity Sought

Municipal and Infrastructure Assurance will join new subsidiaries of Ambac and MBIA, along with industry leader Assured Guaranty Corp., in trying to revive so-called credit enhancements. In all, insurers covered $72 billion, or 18 percent, of new tax-exempt bonds last year. That was down from $201 billion, or 47 percent, in 2007.

The amount of insured issues may rebound to about 35 percent over the next two years, said Guy Lebas, chief economist at Janney Montgomery Scott LLC in Philadelphia. Most of that work may go to a nonprofit firm that issuers hope to create, he said.

“I’d like some more diversity in names” to avoid having the same company backing too many issues, said John F. Flahive, who manages $22 billion in municipal debt at BNY Mellon Wealth Management in Boston.

Almost 70 percent of the firm’s tax-exempt bond holdings are insured, he said.

‘Historically Wide’

The coverage guarantees payments on bonds that defaulted about one-fifth as frequently as AAA corporate debt from 1970 to 2006, according to a Moody’s study in 2007. The policies equalize investors’ risk of lending to issuers of varying quality. In exchange for an upfront premium, borrowers use the firms’ credit ratings instead of their own.

Issuers rated BBB, Standard & Poor’s Corp.’s next-to-lowest investment grade, currently pay 4.75 percent to borrow for 10 years, according to Bloomberg data. The rate for insured general obligation bonds is 3.4 percent -- a difference of $135,000 on each $1 million of debt over the life of the loan.

The gap between yields on BBB- and AAA-rated issuers is about 152 basis points, Bloomberg data show. While down from a record 357 basis points in March, it remains “historically wide,” said Kolman, 54, who spent 25 years in municipal bonds at New York-based Goldman Sachs Group Inc., before retiring in 2007. A basis point is 0.01 percentage point.

Between January 2000 and January 2007, the mean spread was 52.9 basis points.

Premiums Higher

In 2006, when at least seven companies competed, premiums were as low as 15 basis points, according to a December report by the National League of Cities and the National Association of Counties. That meant issuers borrowing $1 million for 10 years paid as little as $2,212.50.

With competition dwindling, insuring A-rated general obligation bonds may now cost from 30 basis points to 75 basis points Kolman said -- or as much as $11,062.50 on $1 million for 10 years.

In 2005, their peak year, firms including Armonk, New York- based MBIA and Ambac of New York covered $233 billion, or 57 percent, of new tax-exempt issues, according to data from Thomson Reuters.

Starting in the mid-1990s, the top companies expanded into guaranteeing mortgage- and asset-backed securities. That business soured in 2007 as subprime mortgages began defaulting at record rates. As guarantors reported losses, their shares plunged.

Read more here