THE Bureau of the Treasury (BTr) has fully awarded all Treasury bills (T-bills) up for auction on Monday with a total of P15 billion, on the back of the slight uptick in bid rates settling within internal estimates of the Treasury.
National Treasurer Rosalia V. de Leon said that the auction committee decided to go for a full award since the bid rates for the security fell within their internal estimates.
“The rates [are] within our own assessment, given we have our own internal models, in terms of the increase it’s like just one to three basis points,” de Leon said.
The 91-day T-bill was awarded the full P4 billion on offer with bids reaching P6.22 billion. The average annual rate posted a slight uptick of 0.7 basis points, settling at 3.225 percent, from 3.218 percent in the previous auction for the security.
“The preference still is on the low end. And there’s also liquidity if you notice because we had in August redemptions amounting to about P91 billion or P86 billion and another P5 billion that we also redeemed. And at the same time coming from the 100-basis-point hike of the MB [Monetary Board]. So I suppose there’s already some comfort from the market on the current rates,” she added.
Bids for the 182-day IOU reached P11.601 billion with the BTr fully awarding the P5 billion on offer, with the average annual rate settling at 4.101 percent. This posted an increase of 3.10 basis points compared to the previous average annual rate in the last auction of
4.070 percent.
The 364-day T-bill was awarded the full P6 billion from bids that reached P9.635 billion. The average annual rate for the IOU settled at 4.899 percent, which increased by two basis points, from the previous auction rate of 4.879 percent.
Last month the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) announced a 50-basis-point hike to their overnight reverse repurchase interest rate.
The hike also came on the heels of two 25-basis-point hikes made in the May and June monetary-policy meetings of the BSP, making it the third consecutive meeting for the year that ended with a rate hike action from the country’s central monetary authority.