At a recent address to the NYU Money Marketeers, a New York-based association of financial market participants, Kenneth Volpert, head of the Fixed Income Group at Vanguard, reviewed just how far and how fast the credit markets had improved since late 2008. At the start of this year, municipal, corporate and high yield spreads had spiked to near all time record wides with liquidity sketchy at best. Six months in, while credit markets will still far from ‘business as usual’, they had markedly improved. One of the more influential bond fund managers in the industry, Volpert was generally optimistic about a continued recovery in the markets, but still expressed some caution – a definite sentiment of “let’s wait and see before we all plunge back into the pool”.

In light of this improving financial climate, attention is slowly turning back from stabilization to identifying the next economic opportunity, and few are seeing as much attention as one of President Obama’s most ambitious (and popular) economic agendas: the promotion of Alternative Energy. Indeed, as we write in a recent article on the subject in the financial publication Global Trade Review:

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