Investors Snub OMO Auction as CBN Fails to Hike Rates

By Dipo Olowookere

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) on Monday continued with its aggressive mopping up of excess cash in the financial system with the sale of treasury bills via Open Market Operations (OMO).

However, the exercise did not record 50 percent participation of market players and according to analysts at Business Post, this may have been caused by the decision of the apex bank not to raise the stop rates of the maturities it offered to auction.

For example, at yesterday’s OMO sale, of the N150 billion worth of the three papers offered for sale, subscriptions worth N63.4 billion were only received from investors.

Of the N20 billion worth of the 108-day bill offered, the bank received and sold N80 million at 11.90 percent; of the N50 billion worth of the 185-day paper, the CBN got and sold N21.59 billion at 13.50 percent;while of the N80 billion worth of the 209-day note, the central bank had and allotted N41.71 billion at 15 percent.Analysts at Zedcrest Research “expect rates in the market to remain elevated, as the CBN is expected to maintain its pace of OMO interventions in anticipation of N551 billion OMO maturities on Thursday.”