Retail and treasury bond offerings in the first five months of the Duterte administration have been “generally successful” so far despite market jitters triggered by external factors, such as the projected rate increase by the US Federal Reserve and the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union last June, according to National Treasurer Roberto Tan.
As for the impact of Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential elections, Tan withheld his observations, saying that it would be better to await the policies that the new American leader would announce and implement starting next year.
The Bureau of Treasury (BTr) holds regular bond auctions twice a month for Treasury bills with short-term tenors of 90 days, 180 days and 1 year and another for longer-term Treasury bonds—for a combined total offering of around P45 billion.
It also issued Retail Treasury Bonds (RTBs) with 10-year tenors two months ago, which raised P100 billion for the government, more than three times the minimum target of P30 billion.
[These bond offerings] have been quite successful, fully subscribed except in the latter part of this year as a result of the volatility and uncertainty in the market because of the Federal actions that are being awaited by the public,” Tan said.“I think once the climate settles down, investors for government securities will return in a very, very strong way,” he said.
Contrary to speculations by certain quarters, Tan said President Duterte’s non-conventional statements have had no impact on the T-bill and Treasury bond floats because buyers are mostly domestic investors who are aware that such remarks would not affect the country’s macroeconomic fundamentals.
“These are mainly domestic investors, and they look at it as nothing that is affecting the macroeconomic policy of the government,” Tan said.
“On the bond market it’s really more of the wait-and-see attitude of many of those who just like to park their money, particularly for the short term. That’s why the BSP Term Deposit Facility is still being saturated by bids from banks and other institutional investors,” he added.
He said that on the T-bills, the BTr had to make some partial awards last month because investors were demanding higher yields, which, based on the Treasury’s evaluation of the market, were “actually an opportunistic bid by many of the Government Securities Eligible Dealers (GSEDs).”
Tan said a Trump presidency and how the Federal Reserve will act on the rate increase would determine market prospects in 2017, although on the part of the Fed, many analysts believe that it “will be very dovish in its statement on what the expectations will be for next year.”
