By Jacob Fine, The Bond Buyer
MINNEAPOLIS U.S. Bancorp sold nearly $800 million of bank-qualified municipal bonds to Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. in an all-or-nothing sale Friday morning.
The bonds are a portion of the combined tax-exempt portfolios of the old U.S. Bancorp and Milwaukee-based Firstar Corp., which bought U.S. Bancorp in February but took its name.
The Firstar and U.S. Bancorp municipal portfolios were listed among the 10 largest at the end of last year by Sheshunoff Information Services Inc., an affiliate of American Banker. Firstars portfolio was the sixth-largest, at $1.5 billion; U.S. Bancorps was ninth-largest, at $1 billion.