Be patient... gold will go to $1650 and beyond. Muni Bonds already imploding. Dec. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Guy LeBas, chief fixed-income strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott LLC, talks about the outlook for the bond market and investment strategy. LeBas, speaking with Deirdre Bolton on Bloomberg Television's "InsideTrack," also discusses Federal Reserve monetary policy. (Source: Bloomberg) Municipal bond investors are trying to unload holdings at the fastest pace in at least 14 years amid increasing mutual fund redemptions and rising U.S. Treasury rates. Bondholders looked for buyers for about $896 million in municipal securities daily this month through Dec. 22, the most on record, according to a Bloomberg bids-wanted index that dates to Aug. 8, 1996. Sellers sought bids for $783 million on average in March 2008, the second-highest monthly tally, the index shows. Investors pulled the biggest weekly amount of money from fixed-income funds in two years after signs of an economic recovery pushed the Standard & Poor's 500 Index of stocks to a two-year high Dec. 22. Guy LeBas, chief fixed-income strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott LLC, said selling picked up after Meredith Whitney, the banking analyst, on Dec. 19 forecast "hundreds of billions of dollars" in municipal defaults. "Many retail investors were expecting big declines in the value of their portfolios because of all the credit problems," said LeBas, who is based in Philadelphia. Investors withdrew more than $2.72 billion from municipal- bond mutual funds in the week ended Dec. 15, the fifth straight week of outflows, according to data compiled by Lipper FMI, a Denver-based research company. Investors have pulled $9.12 billion from municipal funds since the week ended Nov. 11. Mutual fund redemptions lead to bond sales because managers must sell the securities to repay investors. Individual investors make up about 37 percent of the $2.86 trillion muni market, according to Federal Reserve data. `Spate' of Defaults States' fiscal stress may trigger a "spate" of defaults among municipalities, said Whitney, who correctly predicted Citigroup Inc.'s dividend cut in 2008, during a segment on CBS Corp.'s "60 Minutes."
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