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Contact: Jennifer A. Galloway, Chief Communications Officer
             (703) 797-6600
             jgalloway@msrb.org  

MSRB EXPANDS ONLINE TOOLKIT FOR STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENTS  

Alexandria, VA – The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB) today added a number of key resources to its online "toolkit" of educational materials for state and local governments to help them improve their understanding of the municipal securities market.

The MSRB’s State and Local Government Toolkit now includes an overview of the roles and responsibilities of the many financial professionals involved in municipal bond transactions, a tool for tracking trading activity of municipal bonds in the secondary market and information on key market regulations, among other resources. The MSRB launched the toolkit last year with a series of videos, fact sheets and guides about the process of issuing municipal bonds and using the MSRB’s Electronic Municipal Market Access (EMMA®) website.

The centerpiece of the expanded toolkit is the EMMA® Trade Monitor, a new tool that enables state and local governments to export trade data from the EMMA website to a desktop application for analysis of secondary market bond trading activity. State and local governments can use the downloaded data to analyze the prices, yield and amount of secondary market trade activity of municipal bonds in support of, among other things, evaluating pricing for their new issues.

“The MSRB is committed to providing state and local governments with the information they need to make appropriate financing decisions for their communities,” said MSRB Executive Director Lynnette Kelly. “These new additions to the MSRB’s toolkit give state and local governments access to free online tools and resources to better evaluate their municipal financing options.”

Materials in the expanded toolkit include:

The MSRB, whose mission includes protecting state and local governments in their municipal finance transactions, also provides educational resources for investors in municipal securities.

The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB) protects and strengthens the municipal bond market, enabling access to capital, economic growth, and societal progress in tens of thousands of communities across the country. The MSRB fulfills this mission by creating trust in our market through informed regulation of dealers and municipal advisors that protects investors, issuers and the public interest; building technology systems that power our market and provide transparency for issuers, institutions, and the investing public; and serving as the steward of market data that empowers better decisions and fuels innovation for the future. The MSRB is a self-regulatory organization governed by a board of directors that has a majority of public members, in addition to representatives of regulated entities. The MSRB is overseen by the Securities and Exchange Commission and Congress.

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