Posts Tagged ‘Municipal Bonds’
District Gets AAA Bond Rating
Not a lot of folks are getting good news from Wall Street these days, but the District got a little something nice today.
The Office of the Chief Financial Officer is announcing this evening that Standard & Poor's, one of three outfits that rate municipal debt, has given the District a "AAA" rating on a recent bond issue. That's S&P's top mark.
In a statement, CFO Natwar Gandhi calls it "a gilt-edged rating."
Now it's not quite accurate to say that the new rating represents a rise in the District's credit rating, since S&P is passing judgment on a new type of debt instrument, something called income-tax-secured revenue bonds only recently authorized by the D.C. Council. But according to City Administrator Dan Tangherlini, this bond issue is "practically the same as" and "will do the same work of" general-obligation bonds---whose ratings are most commonly cited when referring to the District's creditworthiness.
