The last auction of Treasury bills has closed with a strong volume of demand and with a growing participation of private investors, who already monopolize 45% of the purchases of this type of public debt and who have ousted institutional profiles and internationals as main investors.
In the auction on Tuesday, bills for three and nine months amounting to 1,853 million euros have been placed, according to Treasury sources. Demand has exceeded supply by 3.29 times and has stood at over 6,000 million euros.
For the Government, this interest responds to the “confidence of investors” for this type of public debt. The placement comes after banks suffered sharp falls on the stock market yesterday due to uncertainty surrounding Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), whose activity was suspended on Friday due to its inability to respond to deposit withdrawal requests.
Non-competitive bids, which are those that come from private investors, have been equivalent to 228 million in three-month bills and 509 million in nine-month bills. The rates have been located at 2.67% in the issue at three months, 15 basic points above the previous auction, and at 3.034% at nine months, seven basic points more.
This auction is the second of the month. At the beginning of March, six- and twelve-month bills were placed, in which private investors bought 29% of the issue. Six-month interest was 3.16% and twelve-month interest was 3.33%.
According to Treasury estimates, in February the weight of individuals on these operations was around 25% of the total. Despite the option of physically going to the offices of the Bank of Spain, this type of investor buys the bills above all through the Treasury website, which at the beginning of the year was saturated due to the large number of requests.
Until the end of February, requests to buy public debt through the web amounted to almost 2,400 million euros, well above the 400 million euros registered in the whole of 2022.
The profitability of bills contrasts with that of bank deposits, which still do not offer interesting remuneration to investors. The forecast is that banks will be encouraged to compete for liabilities as of June, when the special loans granted by the ECB to banks during the pandemic are repaid and a good part of the liquidity in the system is absorbed.
The ECB plans to hold a meeting this Thursday in which it will foreseeably raise interest rates by half a point, up to 3.5%. It will also report its inflation expectations and possible additional measures to tackle it.
