By Dipo Olowookere
The money market rates slightly declined on Thursday as inflows of N193 billion Open Market Operations (OMO) maturities offset outflows for the OMO auction sales yesterday.
Specifically, the overnight lending rate went down to 4.49 percent on Thursday from 5.17 percent achieved on Wednesday.
In addition, the Open Buy Back (OBB) rate depreciated to 3.67 percent yesterday from 4.75 percent the previous day.
Meanwhile, the treasury bills market was relatively strong on Thursday as some market players tried to take some positions on the long of the curve.
During the day’s OMO auction exercise conducted by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), traders were more interested in the instrument with longer tenor.
The apex bank, which offered N150 billion worth of the 91-day bill to investors, received and allotted N13.37 billion of the instrument at 12.70 percent, while N250 billion worth of the 189-day bill offered got N173.51 billion from traders and same amount was sold to them at 14.50 percent.
Business Post gathered that as a result of this, the average yields of T-bills declined by 34 points to close at 13 percent.
Adedapo Adesanya 
Modupe Gbadeyanka