The Municipal Bond Pitch: "What You're Giving Me is Pure Bulls**t"

``Felix Rohatyn, who played the lead role in saving New York City from bankruptcy in the 1970s, spoke recently at a Grant's Interest Rate Observer conference at the Plaza Hotel in New York. His talk was distilled in a subsequent edition of Grant's: "Asked if his experience with New York in the 1970s provided a template for solving the public-debt problems of today, Rohatyn could only lift his palms and shake his head. The numbers are staggering, the constitutional barriers formidable and the political will absent." The man who accomplished the impossible, the bailout of New York City in the 1970s, is at a loss: "I just don't see where you go to restructure this."''