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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.

The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB) was established by Congress in 1975 with the mission to protect investors, issuers and the public interest and to promote efficiency, competition and capital formation. MSRB is a private, self-regulatory organization governed by an independent board of directors with market knowledge and expertise. MSRB does not receive federal appropriations and is funded primarily through fees paid by regulated entities. MSRB is overseen by Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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