CB begins to drive G-Sec market to transparent zone

In a bid to make the sale of government securities (bonds and bills) market more transparent, the Central Bank under the new governorship of Dr. Indrajit Coomaraswamy said it would release summary trading statistics on actual trading of government securities in the secondary market. 
This is the first and a welcome move by the Central Bank and a complete U-turn from the stance of previous Central Bank Governor Arjuna Mahendran and his team at the Central Bank who tenaciouslymaintained that any additional information about sale of government securities cannot and should not be in the public domain. 

They even went on to say that the Monetary Law Act barred disclosing certain information to the public pertaining to the sale of government securities.  
However, a Central Bank statement yesterday said from August 1, 2016, all primary dealers have been required to undertake inter-primary dealer trades in the trading platform arranged by the Central Bank through the Bloomberg platform, a major international financial trading and information electronic services provider. 
Further, all primary dealers will report all outright sales of government securities of value in excess of Rs.50 million to investors to this platform within 30 minutes of each transaction. 
Accordingly, the Central Bank will monitor these transactions on an on-going basis and a summary of trading information consisting of yield rates and volume by each series of securities traded will be published in the Central Bank website. 

The Central Bank said it plans to release such information twice a day, at noon and close of the day, in due course once the reporting system is fully operative. 

“This information will help investors to study the current status of government securities market conditions along with other financial markets and economic information and make more informed decisions in relation to their investments,

The availability of such market information will further promote transparency, price discovery and outreach of the government securities market in parallel to other financial markets,” the Central Bank said.

Meanwhile in due course, outright secondary market sales of government securities by non-primary dealer banks to their customers also will be brought into this system, the Central Bank said.