By Dipo Olowookere
The rates of treasury bills crashed on Wednesday as the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) carried out its first auction in 2018 at the primary market.
This was mainly due to the fact that the exercise recorded oversubscriptions across all tenors on offer by the apex bank.
Business Post gathered that the CBN had offered N161.6 billion worth of treasury bills to traders, but eventually received subscriptions worth N388.5 billion from investors.
Much of the subscription was witnessed on the 364-day instrument, receiving a total of N319.19 billion from traders after the apex bank had offered to sell only N115.85 billion.
The second most oversubscribed bill was the 91-day instrument, which received N24.33 billion worth of subscriptions after the central bank had offered N11.77 billion to investors.
The last was 182-day bill, which got N44.99 billion worth of subscriptions from the N33.93 billion put on offer to traders by the apex bank.
At the end of the exercise yesterday, the CBN raised the amount it had hoped to rake from the auctioning, N161.6 billion.
The CBN sold N11.77 billion worth of the 91-day bill at 12.55 percent, N33.93 billion worth of the 182-day instrument at 13.93 percent, and N115.85 billion worth of the 364-day bill at 14.30 percent.
Business Post recalls that at the last auction exercise carried out by the central bank on November 29, 2017, the rate of the 91-day bill cleared at 12.95 percent, the 182-day bill at 15 percent, and the 364-day bill at 15.57 percent.
