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NO one
wants to bet on long-dated interest rates if they can
help it, and this clearly showed on Monday’s bid rates
for Treasury bills when the banks tried to push the
rates higher. In the case of the 91-day benchmark used
for fixing local loans, the banks tested the Treasury’s
resolve by bidding it up 13.7 basis points to 3.809
percent, but were thwarted.
Analysts
said the military-led incident at the Peninsula Manila
Hotel in Makati on Friday led investors to take a
short-haul stance on investments as a whole and partly
explains the preference for short-dated instruments at
the moment.
Sources
at the Department of Finance said Roberto Tan, officer
in charge at the Bureau of Treasury, expected the banks
to swamp the 91-day offering with bids and shy away from
taking positions on both the six-month and one-year
T-bills.
The
volume of acceptable benchmark bids stood at only P1.46
billion, short of the P1.5 billion needed to sell on
Monday but enough excuse for Tan to reject them. “We
were to open it up for liquidity but apparently they’re
not interested.”
The
91-day benchmark stood at only 3.672 percent when Tan
sold them to banks two weeks earlier. But at that time
he sold the entire P2 billion worth of 182-day T-bills
when the bids moved down 5.5 basis points lower to 4.637
percent.
Previously, six-month T-bills averaged 4.692 percent.
One-year T-bills also moved down 0.9 basis points on
Monday to 5.558 percent, but only because Tan tamed the
bid rates by accepting only part of the total offering
of P2.5 billion.
Had the
offers been accepted, the rate for 364-day T-bills would
have gone up 10 basis point to 5.667 percent from 5.567
percent two weeks earlier. |
