Few RIA firms devote the resources to investment research and management that Cumberland Advisors does. Founded in 1973 by David Kotok, the firm claims capital preservation is its overriding goal and believes that both equity and bond prices are “enduringly linked to interest rates.”

The Sarasota, Fla.-based RIA possesses a team of investment professionals that virtually rivals wirehouses and money center banks in talent and depth of analysis, if not breadth. Bob Eisenbeis, its chief monetary economist, is a former executive vice president of the Atlanta Federal Reserve. William Witherell, its chief global economist, spent years as director for financial and enterprise affairs for OECD.

So when three of the firm’s investment advisors––Michael Comes, David Kotok and John Mousseau––author a book entitled Adventures In Muniland: A Guide To Municipal Bond Investing in the Post-Crisis Era, it merits attention.

For financial advisors with clients dispersed around the nation looking for tax-free income, the book provides a thorough analysis of a market consisting of many diverse markets––some sound, others flimsy. Most advisors have read about Puerto Rico, Illinois, New Jersey and other municipal trouble spots, but Comes, Kotok and Mousseau analyze them in detail.

In some ways, the Great Recession transformed the entire asset class. After all, variable-rate auction bonds were among the first fixed-income securities to run into trouble in 2007. At one point, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had to pay a 20% interest rate to reset their securities.

I personally remember overhearing a passenger on airline complain to his accountant that he lacked the funds to pay the IRS because they were invested in supposedly safe auction bonds.

As the Great Recession came to an end in 2009, the prospect for most municipalities appeared bleak indeed. State and local governments, confronted with huge revenue shortfalls, were slashing budgets and services and there was no light at the end of the tunnel.

For doomsayers who made good calls on the sub-prime crisis, the muni market proved to be an irresistible target. Kotok quotes Jane Bryant Quinn’s famous warning to a forecaster to provide either a number or a date, “but never give ‘em both at once.”

Alas for Meredith Whitney, she forgot that piece of advice. Her prediction in 2011 of 50 to 100 sizable muni defaults totaling about $100 billion went down like a Peter Schiff call. In March of that year, Kotok assigned “nearly zero chance” to her forecast materializing.

Kotok gives Nouriel Roubini a little more credit. Roubini suggested that $100 billion of defaults over five years might be conceivable, but added typical 80% recoveries on munis are much higher than those corporate defaults. He understood than “governments cannot be liquidated like companies” and earns a measure of respect from Kotok, who once served as commissioner of the Delaware River Port Authority and as chairman of the New Jersey Casino Reinvestment Authority.

He and Mousseau, who was director of municipal bond investments at Lord Abbett, bring decades of experience to the book, which is organized into analytical pieces they have written since the recession. Mousseau’s analysis of Detroit and Illinois are spot on.

Comes, the youngest co-author, emerges at the end of the book as a perceptive observer chastened by his own experience, having joined Cumberland in 2008 just in time for all the fun to start. By 2014, Comes is finding “green shoots” as many regional economies finally find the problems caused by the recession are starting to recede in the rearview mirror. But as he and other members of the trio are all too aware, the problems facing some municipalities remain implacable.

The book is a fascinating read for people interested in both fixed-income investing and municipal governance. As a New Jersey resident convinced that the moment of impending doom caused by the Garden State’s grossly underfunded public pension isn’t a question of “if” but “when,” some of the commentaries give me a glimmer of hope that the ultimate resolution of the state’s problems may not be as bloody as I’ve imagined.