|
THE
government reiterated the message Monday that it does
not want interest rates to move up, rejecting all bids
for one-year Treasury bills that would have brought
billions more to the national coffers.
“It
appears there was no interest on the part of the market
to buy Treasury bills. Those were bids we believe
unacceptable,” acting Treasury chief and Finance
Undersecretary Roberto Tan said after the auction
committee chose not to sell a single centavo of the P6
billion worth of one-year T-bills on offer Monday.
The
one-year paper has become the substitute benchmark since
the start of April after the Treasury scrapped both the
91- and 182-day T-bills in March when the banks
aggressively started submitting higher rates for their
money.
Tan said
the banks’ disinterest showed when they submitted only
P3.15 billion when the government wanted to sell as much
as P6 billion.
He said
the banks would part with their money had the rate been
allowed to move up by 99.3 basis points to 6.986
percent.
Tan
scoffed at the idea, noting the one-year rate stood at
only 5.993 percent on April 14.
“The
banks were really just interested in the Bangko Sentral
ng Pilipinas’s [BSP] special deposit accounts [SDA] and
not in our T-bills,” he told reporters.
The
competing SDAs pay a little over 5 percent at the moment
and these mature well under one year.
Tan also
said the banks would rather wait for the monetary
authorities in the United States to signal where
interest rates would be when they meet to set their own
interest rates later this week.
He said
the direction of the country’s own interest rate and
inflation outlook were uncertain for the time being, but
should clear up somehow when the US Federal Open Market
Committee begins its deliberations.
The US
Fed decision provides clues to the country’s own
interest rate setting outlook based on past policy
decisions by the BSP’s seven-man Monetary Board, he
said. |
