Changes Are Sought in Municipal Bond Trades

The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board has told the Securities and Exchange Commission that it wants to change its rules for disclosing prices of municipal bond trades so that all trades are disclosed the next day, the self-regulatory agency said Monday.

Under current rules, prices are disclosed only for bonds that trade two or more times a day.

The changes are some of the last possible before the industry moves toward real-time price disclosure for the $1.8-trillion municipal bond market sometime before the end of September 2004, said Kit Taylor, executive director of the MSRB.

“We’re delivering about as much disclosure to the market as we can, and this is almost the last stop on the way to having a real-time disclosure system up,” Taylor said.