Municipal bond arbitrage, also called municipal bond relative value arbitrage, municipal arbitrage, or just muni arb, generally consists of building a leveraged portfolio of high-quality, tax-exempt
municipal bond
A municipal bond, commonly known as a muni, is a Bond (finance), bond issued by state or local governments, or entities they create such as authorities and special districts. In the United States, interest income received by holders of municipal ...
s and simultaneously hedging the duration risk in that municipal bond portfolio by
shorting
In finance, being short in an asset means investing in such a way that the investor will profit if the value of the asset falls. This is the opposite of a more conventional " long" position, where the investor will profit if the value of t ...
the equivalent taxable corporate bonds. These corporate equivalents are typically
interest rate swaps
In finance, an interest rate swap (IRS) is an interest rate derivative (IRD). It involves exchange of interest rates between two parties. In particular it is a "linear" IRD and one of the most liquid, benchmark products. It has associations wit ...
referencing
Libor
The London Inter-Bank Offered Rate is an interest-rate average calculated from estimates submitted by the leading banks in London. Each bank estimates what it would be charged were it to borrow from other banks. The resulting average rate is u ...
or BMA (short for Bond Market Association). Muni arb is a relative value strategy that seizes upon an inefficiency that is related to government tax policy; interest on municipal bonds is exempt from federal income tax. Because the source of this arbitrage is artificially imposed by government regulation, it has persisted (i.e., it has not been "arbed away") for decades.
The
arbitrage
In economics and finance, arbitrage (, ) is the practice of taking advantage of a difference in prices in two or more markets; striking a combination of matching deals to capitalise on the difference, the profit being the difference between the ...
manifests itself in the form of a relatively cheap longer maturity municipal bond, which is a municipal bond that yields significantly more than 65% of a corresponding taxable corporate bond. The steeper slope of the municipal
yield curve
In finance, the yield curve is a graph which depicts how the yields on debt instruments - such as bonds - vary as a function of their years remaining to maturity. Typically, the graph's horizontal or x-axis is a time line of months or ye ...
allows participants to collect more after-tax income from the municipal bond portfolio than is spent on the interest rate swap; the carry is greater than the hedge expense. Positive, tax-free carry can reach into the double digits.
The bet in municipal bond arbitrage is that, over a longer period of time, two similar instruments--municipal bonds and interest rate swaps--will correlate with each other; they are both very high quality credits, have the same maturity and are denominated in U.S. dollars. Credit risk and duration risk are largely eliminated in this strategy. However, basis risk arises from use of an imperfect hedge, which results in significant, but range-bound principal volatility. The end goal is to limit this principal volatility, eliminating its relevance over time as the high, consistent, tax-free cash flow accumulates.
Arbitrage
Financial markets
Local government finance
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