Peg Henry retires from Stifel but isn’t ready to bid farewell to munis
5 min read
Margaret “Peg” Henry, whose legal career has spanned both the private and public sectors, has retired from Stifel Financial Corp. and is looking toward the future with both excitement about a new business she’s started and hope for a less heavy-handed regulatory era at the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Henry, who retired from Stifel June 30 after spending more than a decade there, discussed her career and her thoughts on some current regulatory topics in a recent interview with The Bond Buyer.
“I am heartened by some of the remarks being made by new SEC Chair Paul Atkins when he talks about moving away from regulation by enforcement,” Henry said, adding there were some cease and desist orders issued over the last several years “particularly in the
However, “some bad actors” still exist, “and so there’s still a substantial role for enforcement in the muni area,” she said.
“But I think it’s just important to have a balance,” Henry said.
As for her new business, Henry has established Peg Henry PLLC to provide municipal securities legal consulting and expert witness services.
That shouldn’t be too heavy a lift for Henry, considering that her resume also lists law firms, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of the Tax Legislative Counsel, the SEC’s Office of Municipal Securities and the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board among the many places she’s worked during her career.
“I’ve always really enjoyed what I do,” said Henry, who began doing legal work involving municipal securities in 1981. “Thank goodness, I’ve done it a long-enough time.”
Stifel General Counsel Mark Fisher said Henry’s “influence at Stifel and in public finance is hard to overstate.”
She joined Stifel in late 2014 and since 2022 has served as head of municipal securities group legal.
“Over her decade at Stifel, she guided us as we integrated teams and navigated regulatory and market change,” Fisher said. “She brought unique insight, integrity, and passion to our team.”
While Henry wasn’t ready to close the book on her muni career, “I don’t necessarily need to be on call 60 hours a week,” she said. In addition to providing a more flexible schedule, the new business will allow Henry to focus on the areas of her work she most enjoys including providing advice “when an area is a gray area and it’s not clear what the answer is,” she said.
“There may or may not be guidance and what guidance is there may not be clear,” Henry said. “That’s true so much of the time.”
Helping firms prepare for examinations by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority or the SEC is also something she enjoys.
“I like getting a firm in a position to do well on an exam because they’ve got good procedures and because they’ve been trained well, so that when the examiners come to call, they don’t find problems, they find a firm that’s equipped to deal with the exam,” Henry said. “That’s one of the parts of the work that I enjoy the most and I think I’ve been very successful at that.”
While Henry’s career as a lawyer in the municipal finance arena has been long and successful, she didn’t start out with the goal of getting into munis.
“I just sort of fell into it, and that’s the way that a lot of people find themselves doing munis,” she said. “I went to work in 1981 for a small law firm in Washington, D.C. and they just happened to be doing some municipal bond tax work.”
A partner who left that firm recommended Henry to a headhunter working on behalf of the
“The Tax Reform Act of 1986 eliminated a lot of types of municipal bonds,” Henry said, citing pollution control bonds as one example. “And not only that, it largely eliminated the ability to arbitrage – that is to issue bonds at a tax-exempt rate and invest the proceeds of the bonds at a taxable rate and make a lot of profit.”
Consequently, the amount of bond deals being done “dropped dramatically,” she said.
Also around that time, “regional law firms became ascendant,” so Mudge Rose, a national law firm, lost business that way as well, Henry said, adding that she could “see the writing on the wall.”
“So when I had the opportunity to go into government, I took it,” she said.
Her first stop was the Treasury’s Office of the Tax Legislative Counsel after which she joined the House Committee on Ways and Means.
“Treasury and Ways and Means were totally different environments,” Henry said. “And I wasn’t crazy about the environment at Treasury because it was very much of an ivory tower environment.”
When two staffers – one at Ways and Means and the other at the Joint Committee on Taxation – decided to leave, she was asked to come to Capitol Hill, where she served as tax counsel to the Ways and Means Committee.
“I really enjoyed the atmosphere up there and I felt I was able to contribute a lot,” she said.
Another place where Henry found a great deal of enjoyment in her work was at the MSRB, where she served from 2008 to 2012. Among her proudest accomplishments during her time there was her work on an interpretive notice issued in 2012 regarding MSRB Rule G-17, a rule requiring dealers and municipal advisors to deal fairly.
The interpretive notice “talked about … what kind of conduct that rule dictated with respect to underwriters and their dealings with issuers of municipal securities,” Henry said.
“It took three years to finally get it adopted, but it is of considerable significance,” she said, adding that on her last day at the MSRB her colleagues presented her with a framed New York Times article regarding that interpretative guidance.
That May 2012 article is currently hanging on the wall of Henry’s Manhattan apartment along with an August 2023 article in The Bond Buyer regarding her inclusion in its
Henry’s career path as an attorney in the municipal securities area has taken her down many different roads and has sometimes required her to change course quickly.
“I was fortunate enough to fall on my feet when I made these moves and gain a great deal of experience,” she said, adding that she has also met “a lot of great people” and been exposed to many different perspectives. “And that has stood me well.”
