Today's BB: Where Angels Fear to Tread

JB Hanauer's Dick Larkin steps into the verbal firefight over governmental accounting standards.  His analysis:  That a lot of the issuer community's opposition to new GASB rules stems from the underwhelming market impact of Statement 34's changes to the way issuers account for the value of their infrastructure.  Why take on the expense and aggravation of calculating and disclosing OPEB liabilities if no one's listening?

Larkin answers convincingly:  Because a $1 trillion retiree health care liability is a lot more meaningful than the average life of a stretch of asphalt...

Meanwhile, Ted Phillips reports that New York State is considering a $1.38 billion competitive bond sale during the second quarter, a move that should warm the hearts of some municipal-bond columnists, if no one else. 

Ten years ago, market participants New Jersey officials when they conducted a billion-dollar competitive sale, but the market's capacity to put away bonds has grown since then.  Equally important is a related story from Phillips, which chronicles the fact that Gov. Eliot Spitzer is just starting to make new appointments to state authority boards that will have major sway in choosing underwriters for what will no doubt continue to be a large volume of negotiated deals from those entities -- it's presumably not a time for Wall Street to be picking fights with the new administration. 

Of course, if there are bankers out there who'd like to question the state's thinking, the comments section beckons...

Elsewhere on the Web: Bond Inequality

With April 15th just around the corner, personal-finance columnists across the country have rediscovered the fact that municipal bonds are tax-exempt. Most of those pieces are too formulaic to merit a link, but an original take on that angle comes in this San Francisco Chronicle story, which has subsuquently been published in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and in other cities, looking at potential impacts of a Federal tax-law change that requires payers to report tax-exempt interest to the IRS. 

Tomorrow's Bond Buyer Today:  At some point in the next 18 months, we're going to have a fascinating article on the gap between the amount of tax-exempt interest reported by payers on these new 1099-INT forms, and the amount reported by recipients on their 1040 forms.  Here's betting that the rates of "voluntary compliance" are found lacking...

Meanwhile, Crain's Cleveland Business looks at the foreclosure epidemic spreading across northern Ohio, and discusses efforts by Cuyahoga County and the state to combat it, including Ohio Housing Finance Authority's $100 million anti-foreclosure bond package.

And from overseas, The Japan Times reports on a study from Japan's Internal Affairs Ministry that measures per-capita debt sales by Japan's "1,844 city, ward, town and village governments nationwide as well as the 47 prefectural governments."  The study found a huge disparity in relative indebtedness, with poorer communities bearing higher debt loads, leading to talk of the central government possibly assuming debts or responsibility for services.  It would be fascinating to see a similar study domestically (hint, hint...)