Featured in Fox Interviewer

Michael Lissack

Former municipal bond banker · Whistleblower

A former municipal bond banker's case that Wall Street banks rigged VRDO rates — costing taxpayers hundreds of millions a year.

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Michael Lissack featured in Fox Interviewer

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The client

Michael Lissack worked inside the municipal bond market from 1981 to 1995 and is known for exposing the "yield burning" scandal. In 1994 he wrote "Theft at the Public Till," a manuscript naming names; he says its publication was suppressed at the time. He has since documented what he calls a decades-long pattern of abuse in his series "Fraud and Worse in the Municipal Bond Market."

The goal

Lissack's research is technical — index signals, Tuesday bond pricing, basis points — and had been repeatedly ignored. The aim was to put his argument in front of a general business audience in plain language, with the stakes made clear: public money that should have funded schools, infrastructure and healthcare.

What we did

We turned his findings on Variable Rate Demand Obligations — a $151 billion market he says was manipulated by major banks between 2008 and 2016 — into a readable feature: how rates were allegedly coordinated, what it cost municipalities, why fragmented oversight let it continue, and the reforms he proposes. Lissack approved it, and we placed it with Fox Interviewer.

The result

The piece is live on Fox Interviewer as "The VRDO Rate-Rigging Scandal: How Wall Street Bilked Taxpayers" (June 3, 2025) — a clear, public version of an argument that had been buried in technical detail.