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THE rate
of the benchmark 364-day Treasury bills increased at
Monday’s auction as banks wanted to gain more as a
result of higher consumer prices.
The
average rate went up by 28.8 basis points to 5.993
percent, from the previous 5.705 percent, as the
government expects inflation to reach 8 percent before
the year ends.
To keep
the rates down, the auction committee at the Bureau of
Treasury rejected most of the tenders, accepting just
1.8 billion of the 4.2 billion bids.
Finance
Undersecretary Gil Beltran, who chairs the auction
committee, said the rate was in line with secondary
market rates of 5.6 percent to 6 percent for the
one-year debt paper.
“Most of
the banks bid at the 6-percent range. We could have
rejected everything,” Beltran said after the auction.
He said
the government has no problem with the cash flow at this
point and can settle to partially award the borrowing.
“The
government has no maturing obligations this week,” he
added.
The
government is scheduled to borrow some P84 billion from
the domestic market in the second quarter, out of its
P242-billion programmed total local borrowing this year.
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