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Contact: Jennifer A. Galloway, Chief Communications Officer
               202-838-1500
               jgalloway@msrb.org

MSRB ADDS BLOOMBERG BVAL TO MUNICIPAL MARKET YIELD CURVES ON EMMA

Washington, DC – The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB) today expanded the availability of municipal market yield curves and indices on its Electronic Municipal Market Access (EMMA®) website. The addition of Bloomberg’s BVAL Municipal AAA Curve to EMMA today gives investors another tool intended to help monitor the level and direction of municipal bond interest rates, and compare relative yields of specific municipal securities.

“The MSRB’s vision is for EMMA to evolve into a comprehensive transparency platform that brings together data, documents and tools that support fair and efficient transactions and facilitate decision-making in the municipal market,” said MSRB Executive Director Lynnette Kelly. “We are excited to provide free access on EMMA to municipal market yield curves and indices for investors who in the past may not have been able to take advantage of these powerful benchmarking and analytical tools.”

Bloomberg’s BVAL municipal curve uses real-time trades and contributed sources to reflect market movement as it happens. Bloomberg's BVAL service prices 2.5 million fixed income securities, including nearly 1 million municipal bonds which are priced three times a day.

"Bloomberg is proud to work with the MSRB to bring more transparency to the municipal bond market by offering the BVAL Municipal AAA curve on the EMMA site," said Varun Pawar, global head of Bloomberg's evaluated pricing service. "BVAL is the primary pricing source for the Bloomberg Barclays indices, which are widely used by institutional fund managers to measure investment performance. Retail investors now have access to yield curve data that correlates to these muni market benchmarks."

Bloomberg’s BVAL Municipal AAA Curve is available on EMMA’s Tools and Resources page, as are a daily yield curve from the Associated Press (AP) and historical index data for five different indices from Standard & Poor’s (S&P), which were made available in July 2017. Access yield curves and indices on EMMA.

Market indicators, including the AP and Bloomberg yield curves and S&P indices available on EMMA, are useful tools for evaluating bond prices and yields, measuring market direction and performance, and determining pricing on new bond issues. Read about understanding yield curves and indices in the MSRB Education Center. The MSRB may add more yield curves and other tools over time as part of its ongoing effort to enhance the availability of market-wide data, in addition to information about individual bonds. Earlier this month, the MSRB began the daily release of previously unavailable market statistics on EMMA. The MSRB also has provided access on EMMA to two interactive calendars that display upcoming bond offerings and upcoming economic reports and events. 

The MSRB’s EMMA website is the official source of data and disclosure documents on more than one million outstanding municipal securities. The MSRB operates the EMMA website in support of its mission to protect investors, state and local governments, and the public interest by promoting a fair and efficient municipal market.

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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