Courtesy of Mish.
On May 13, Moody’s shocked the municipal bond market by downgrading Chicago to junk.
At that time S&P rated Chicago five notches higher, the widest spread between bond raters in history.
Kristi Culpepper, AKA “Bond Girl” comments on the event in What Chicago’s Fiscal Emergency says about the Quality of Credit Analysis in the Municipal Bond Market.
In a sense, Moody’s was only validating the bond market’s opinion of the city’s creditworthiness — the bonds had already been trading at junk levels for several months. This should have been a straightforward event for the chattering class to process intellectually. Rating actions tend to lag the market rather than lead it.
Oddly, however, Moody’s downgrade sparked a debate over whether Moody’s was being “fair” to Chicago.
How could Moody’s cut the city to junk when the other rating agencies rate the city so much higher? (That has obviously never happened before in an era of ratings shopping and superdowngrades.) Wouldn’t having a diverse economy and large tax base cancel out the costs associated with machine politics? (It’s not like this is Chicago’s third fiscal crisis in the past century.)
This was probably the first instance in the history of the capital markets that a rating agency was accused of having too radical an attitude toward risk.
There is a conversation to be had about how politics influences the perception of financial commitments and whether bond structures can further evolve to protect bondholders. If the general obligation pledge — absent a statutory lien, which few states have — lacks teeth in court, why isn’t it obsolete? Why is this bond structure still the foundation for credit analysis? Does the general obligation pledge allow governments to over-commit themselves financially in certain political contexts? I would submit to you that this absolutely the case with Chicago.
What financial risks does Chicago pose to investors?
Let’s examine Chicago’s credit profile and you can decide whether or not the city’s bonds are speculative investments.
From Nuveen:
Chicago’s combined annual debt and pension costs are substantially higher than any [of the ten largest US cities] when these obligations are indexed to total governmental revenue. Chicago’s fiscal 2015 debt service and annual pension costs account for 44.8% of fiscal 2013 governmental revenue. San Jose is the next closest city at 27.8%. The nine cities other than Chicago averaged 22.4% of revenue.…
