Municipal News & Jobs

School leaders in Dodge City USD 443 were flummoxed. For years, the district had maintained respectable graduation rates — great, even, for a district with high rates of at-risk and low-income students. With graduation percentages in the mid to upper 80s, Dodge City USD 443 most years trailed the average statewide graduation rate, but not by much. What didn’t make sense, though, at least not initially, was the dismal rate at which students went on to pursue any kind of education or training after high school, a measure called post-secondary effectiveness that the Kansas State Department of Education started tracking in 2015. In Dodge City, only about 1 in 5 students who entered Dodge City High School as freshman enrolled in any kind of post-high school education, per a five-year average of the first half of the 2010s. … Why weren’t students doing anything else after graduating high school? School leaders had a few ideas, and after Superintendent Fred Dierksen arrived to the district six years ago, Dodge City USD 443 began turning its rates around, nearly doubling its post-secondary success rate to 40.4% in the latest data collection. It’s a roadmap to success that other Kansas school districts should look at, Education Commissioner Randy Watson previously told the Kansas State Board of Education. Here’s how the district made it happen.
Read more: Salina Journal

The year 2022 marked a truly historic bust for the U.S. bond market. The question now is whether 2023 will produce any kind of meaningful rebound. … Investors were forced to repeatedly lift their expectations for how high the Federal Reserve would raise short-term interest rates to combat the worst inflation in decades. The sharp drop in bond prices was in many ways the dominant force in financial markets, driving borrowing costs higher and contributing to double-digit losses for stocks. Despite bonds’ 2022 drubbing and the criticism that the Fed has come under for being slow to act on inflation, investors, if anything, have been consistently more optimistic than the central bank. That continues today, with investors forecasting lower interest rates than the Fed—a divide that some analysts and traders say poses a significant risk of extending last year’s rout.
Source: Wall Street Journal

Big banks are predicting that an economic downturn is fast approaching. More than two-thirds of the economists at 23 large financial institutions that do business directly with the Federal Reserve are betting the U.S. will have a recession in 2023. Two others are predicting a recession in 2024. The firms… cite a number of red flags: Americans are spending down their pandemic savings. The housing market is in decline, and banks are tightening their lending standards. … The main culprit is the Federal Reserve, economists said, which has been raising rates for months to try to slow the economy and curb inflation. Though inflation has eased recently, it is still much higher than the Fed’s desired target. The Fed raised rates seven times in 2022, pushing its benchmark from a range of 0% to 0.25% to the current 4.25% to 4.50%, a 15-year high. Officials signaled in December that they plan to keep raising rates to between 5% and 5.5% in 2023. Most of the economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal expect the higher rates will push the unemployment level from November’s 3.7% to above 5%—still low by historical standards, but that increase would mean that millions of Americans would lose their jobs.
Source: Wall Street Journal

The interest rate table above illustrates recent changes in a sample of MBIS “investment grade” yields. Every issuer’s credit is different. For rates that may be applicable to your municipality, contact our Municipal Bond Advisors, Larry Kleeman, Beth Warren and Henry Schmidt.