PRESS RELEASE

Release Date:    July 21, 2009

Contact:             Tavia Gilchrist, Communications Specialist
                           (703) 797-6600
                           tgilchrist@msrb.org

The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board Publishes First Municipal
Bond Trading Fact Book with Data on More Than 40 Million Trades

Alexandria, VA–The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board today published its 2008 Fact Book, a comprehensive reference for historical trade data and statistics about the $2.7 trillion municipal bond market. The Fact Book provides for the first time a compilation of key municipal market statistics unavailable elsewhere, with aggregate data on more than 40 million trades made in the last five years.

The MSRB, which regulates municipal securities dealers and collects and disseminates market information, is uniquely positioned to meet investor demand for increased information about municipal bonds as it collects all official data and documents about the market.  The Fact Book encompasses information on nearly every trade reported to the MSRB by dealers since 2004 and includes data from aggregate quarterly and yearly trading volume on various types of municipal issues and trades.   For the first time, researchers, investors, market participants and the public have a single and free source of aggregate market data at their fingertips.

The MSRB’s launch this year of its Electronic Municipal Market Access (EMMA) website at www.emma.msrb.org has also simplified the process of researching municipal bonds.  EMMA makes available to the public for free, hundreds of thousands of municipal bond offering documents, ongoing disclosures about the bonds, real-time prices of millions of municipal trades and daily market statistics.  An electronic version of the Fact Book in its entirety is available free of charge on EMMA and on MSRB’s website at www.msrb.org.

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The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB) was established in 1975 by Congress to protect investors and the public interest by promoting a fair and efficient municipal securities market. To accomplish this mission, the MSRB regulates securities firms and banks that underwrite, trade and sell municipal securities, and collects and disseminates market information. The MSRB operates the Electronic Municipal Market Access (EMMA) website to promote transparency and widespread access to information, provides education and conducts extensive outreach as part of its mission-driven activities. The MSRB is composed of members from the municipal securities dealer community and the public, and is a self-regulatory organization subject to oversight by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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