Joins us live here on the trading floor of the big board.
John Miller, head and CIO at First Eagle Municipal Credit Team.
Great to see you, sir.
Thanks for taking some time for us today.
Thank you for having me.
Not just a great guest, but a guest who just rang the closing bell.
First and foremost, your experience, you and the team down here, we had incredible enthusiasm.
I feel like this is the dream for so many people in our biz, right?
Whether you're on your side or my side, everyone wants to ring the bell.
What was it like for you?
Well, there's a lot of history.
There's a lot of energy.
It's just a fabulous.
Place to be here.
Talk to me about First Eagle Municipal Credit, the work you do, your key priorities for anyone watching this interview who might be a bit unfamiliar with your core work and products.
Sure, well, uh, First Eagle launched municipal bond products starting in early 2024, starting with high yield municipals.
We've raised approximately $10 billion in the last 2.5 years, uh, outperforming benchmarks.
Really our goal is to create state.
High levels of tax exempt income monthly across mutual funds and now just now getting into the ETF market as well.
You know as well as I, you probably know far better than I do that there's a lot of would-be investors or traders out there.
They always see the headlines about the shiny things, the things going parabolic.
Talk to me about the importance of municipal bonds for anyone out there looking to diversify their own portfolio allocations who might not really have given this particular asset class a ton of consideration up until now.
Yes, it's a great point.
Municipals are a nice diversifier to a balanced portfolio.
They kick off tax-exempt income, which is increasingly important over time.
It's increasingly important to affluent investors.
Taxes are very unlikely to be going down anytime soon, and several states are also raising state level personal income taxes.
Many municipals are.
Exempt from both, they also, as you alluded, don't have the same volatility characteristics and are not sensitive to the same drivers as equities necessarily.
So you get that benefit from lower correlations.
You get the benefit of diversification and general stability of your asset value where you collect the income, and they've quietly been a big winner so far year to date here in 2026.
What do you Attribute that success to that we've seen in the general municipal bond space and talk to me a bit about your outlook for the second half of this calendar year.
Well, I think a couple of things are very interesting about the first half.
First of all, the Munich Market is in the midst of its 3rd consecutive year of record high supply, so municipalities coming to market and bringing bond deals, issuing a lot of paper.
When you combine that with changing Fed expectations, expectations around future inflation from the war and oil prices, you would typically see sort of a pullback and that might be accompanied with outflows from funds that specialize in municipal products like ours do.
Thus far this year we have not seen that.
Actually we've seen a continuous demand to place money into this asset class that has created stability and a backdrop of liquidity and just overall income driven performance.
So the performance of products has been very highly correlated to income.
Uh, so far this year with a relative stability in NAV or net asset value, um, outperforming as you, as you mentioned, outperforming, say taxable fixed income or US Treasury bonds.
Very well done and thanks a lot for taking the time to join us, John Miller.
Really nice to see you.
Come back on the show anytime.
Thank you very much.
All right folks.
The trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
I brought you a cheer section.
