William Bailey, 78, Dies; Advocate for Municipal Bonds
NY Times
illiam O. Bailey, an insurance executive who helped attract investors to many public projects by persuading the insurance industry to guarantee municipal bonds, died yesterday at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. He was 78 and lived in Manhattan and Moultonborough, N.H.
The cause was pneumonia, his wife, Carole, said.
As a senior executive at the Aetna Life and Casualty Company in the 1970’s, Mr. Bailey enlisted four other firms to jointly offer state and local governments insurance that would guarantee the repayment of money lent to them by investors. Because such municipal bond issues often amounted to nearly $100 million, insuring them was too expensive for any one company.
