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BANKS
lapped up every single one-year paper that the Bureau of
Treasury auctioned on Monday.
The
government sold all P6 billion worth of Treasury bills
at 8.7 basis points lower than the rate two weeks
earlier.
This
brought the one-year rate to 6.703 percent, from 6.790
percent a fortnight ago when National Treasurer Roberto
Tan had to reject all bids for the IOUs.
“The
banks needed to put their funds somewhere, [after] the
excess liquidity [has] not [been] invested the past two
weeks,” Tan said after the auction.
The
auction results signal a change in outlook on the part
of banks as far as government’s finances are concerned.
Last
week Finance Secretary Margarito Teves reported a
P7-billion budget surplus in May that helped trim the
five-month budget gap by 55 percent to P18.8 billion
from a year earlier.
“This
just shows we’re very liquid,” he stressed.
The
results also show that banks prefer to invest in
one-year T-bills than in so-called special deposit
accounts, or SDAs, offered by the Bangko Sentral ng
Pilipinas.
“There
had been some shifting from other securities instruments
like the central bank’s SDAs. The market seems very
liquid,” he said.
Tan also
hinted strongly at the likelihood of restoring the sale
of the shorter-dated 91- and 182-day T-bills that were
scrapped early this year when domestic interest rates
started to pick up.
“We
might bring them back because there have been
expressions of interest for them recently,” he told
reporters.
In
addition, Tan also hinted of restoring the sale of new
retail Treasury bonds, or RTBs, which are long-dated
government IOUs normally available only for corporate
and high networth individuals.
RTBs
were earlier sold in P5,000 lots per investor. The sale
generated total interest of more than P70 billion.
“We’re
planning to sell them again not so much for revenues but
more to provide opportunities for reinvestment for the
small saver,” Tan said.
The sale
“could be lower than P33 billion” that the market
speculated on in recent weeks, Tan said. |
