People & Places: Ginny Housum, UMB Bank Honored at Smith's High Yield Conference
Ginny Housum, Senior Vice President, municipal bond workout specialist at UMB Bank in Minneapolis accepted Smith's High Yield Lifetime Achievement Award at Smith's High Yield Municipal Bond Conference.
Mary Jane Minier of Invesco and First-Team All-Star CCRC Analyst, said, "We're honored to have Ginny Housum, senior vice president at UMB Bank, and who is an investor-trustee, participating on the CCRC Panel. She has worked within the CCRC sector throughout her career. Ginny is also somewhat of a celebrity because she is going to be receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award. It's very richly deserved."
Prior to joining UMB Bank in 2013, Ginny was a municipal bond workout specialist at Wells Fargo Bank, involved in numerous defaults of CCRCs, hotels, multifamily housing facilities, sports arenas, charter schools, private schools, and other facilities financed with municipal debt. She has extensive experience working with institutional investors, especially mutual fund analysts. From 1992-2003, Ginny was a Partner at Dorsey & Whitney LLP representing indenture trustees in workouts and municipal bond defaults.
Previous experience includes law firms in Denver, CO; U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing , and Urban Affairs, counsel, and general counsel to the Financial Institutions and Consumer Affairs Subcommittee in Washing ton DC.
She has an LL.M. in Taxation from New York University; a J.D. from University of Denver; and a B.A. from University of Colorado.
To put Ms. Housum's contributions in proper context, high-yield municipal bonds must viewed not just in the overall muni bond market but the entire fixed-income market. Interestingly, when one looks at the performance of municipals, the municipal high yield portion of the market is by far the best performing fixed income market. And, not just in the U.S, but globally: it's the best performing market.
The work of Ms. Housum, and her colleagues, is why the high-yield municipal bond market has performed so well during the pandemic. She has enabled investors to exercise their rights to receive timely, ongoing disclosure. What's more, Ms. Housum has worked to implement remedies that recover value and sustain the revenues that support the repayment of interest and principal.
In her world, the corporate trustee agreements are typically written with "boiler-plate" legal language. But, during her acceptance speech, Ms. Housum explained that her involvement stemmed from the recognition, early in her career, that investors depend on those legal frameworks. She understands the distinction between days cash on hand and a liquidity provision. Ms. Housum knows the meaning of timely payment of interest.
Her professionalism, qualifications, and dedication to the high-yield bond market are why the CCRC sector, specifically, and municipal bonds, more generally, have remained resilient during the pandemic.
