On October 5, Marc Joffe of the Reason Foundation published an article on Financial Reporting Standards Can Foster Municipal Market Disruption in the Financial Revolutionist. Below is an excerpt from the article:
“While fintech start-ups are disrupting many financial markets, the US municipal bond market has been largely left behind. As a result, the $3.9-trillion muni market remains largely inefficient, replete with frictions that reduce investor returns and raise costs for issuers. Higher costs for municipal bond issuers translate into a combination of higher taxes and reduced services, so minimizing issuance costs and constraining coupon rates is a matter of public interest, and should attract support throughout the political spectrum…
A major challenge is a lack of technology standards…
As a result, it is more expensive for data aggregators to compile data sets of municipal financial statistics. Since compiling this data is costlier, it is less widely available. While standardized company financial results are freely available at numerous websites, the same isn’t true for city and county fiscal data. “
Read the article.
