MARKET TALK: Recovering Municipalities Need Better PR

Investors don't have a good understanding on what some troubled municipalities have done to improve their finances, and "it's incumbent on you as a municipality coming out of distress to take a really hard look at how you communicate with the market," says Philadelphia Treasurer Nancy Winkler at a distressed-municipalities conference in the city. She notes a "really eye-opening conversation" she had with a "major market maker" who thought Philadelphia only had 700K residents when the actual figure is about 1.5M. "We're trying to put a lot more information out there that gives people a better handle of what's going on in the city." An authority was created to oversee Philadelphia's finances in 1991.