The First Half of the Year
One of the great places to find information is from Mexico. Yes, it's a whole different country, but their reporting agency 
can show some pretty accurate information. Of course, Mexico typically runs a few months behind the United States, but it's generally a good indicator of what is going on.
Mexico also has a system that is quite different from the United States. Instead of a whole host of surety bond companies, they have fifteen authorized firms. These surety companies reported $4.35 billion pesos (approx $333 million US) in premiums. Significantly, this is a increase of over 12.5% over the previous year.
Administrative bonds, which is 73.2% of the market, had the largest growth in the amount of 18.8%.
Fidelity bonds fell 0.9% (basically, statistical noise) and commercial bonds declined 7.5%.
