MANILA – The Bureau of the Treasury (BTr) has raised more than the initially offered amount in its Treasury bills (T-bills) auction on Monday.
As the debt paper was oversubscribed by nearly fourfold, the Auction Committee raised a total of PHP17 billion from its initial offer of PHP15 billion.
“The auction was almost four times oversubscribed with total bids reaching PHP59.8 billion, prompting the Committee to double the accepted non-competitive bids for the 364-day securities to 4.0 billion,” the BTr said in a statement.
The market was still biased toward short-term T-bills, as the 91-day paper fetched a total tender of PHP21.41 billion. The committee accepted PHP5 billion of the total bids, with yield settling at 5.727 percent.
For the 182-day T-bills, the BTr raised PHP5 billion from a total of PHP19.91 billion bids. The average yield for the medium-term debt paper stood at 5.893 percent.
The 364-day T-bills had a total tender of PHP18.52 billion. The Auction Committee raised PHP7 billion from this longer tenor paper. The average yield settled at 6.037 percent.
Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. chief economist Michael Ricafort said average yield for all tenors of T-bills were lower for three consecutive weeks.
“(This is) consistent with the continued slight week-on-week declines in most comparable short-term PHP BVAL (Bloomberg Valuation Service) yields. Also, after mostly softer local GDP (gross domestic product), inflation, employment, manufacturing, trade data recently could lead to more dovish signals from local monetary authorities at this coming Thursday’s monetary policy-setting meeting and eventually support possible local policy rate cuts, but may have to wait for the first Fed(eral Reserve) rate cut later this year or in 2025 to maintain healthy interest rate differentials,” Ricafort said. (PNA)
