34.97b yuan of special T-bonds to be issued

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2007-11-04 10:25

The Chinese Ministry of Finance said another batch of 34.97 billion yuan (US$4.59 billion) of 10-year special treasury bonds would be on sale from Monday.

The new batch of bonds, on offer from November 5 to November 7, will have an annual yield of 4.49 percent, and will become tradable on November 12 through the national inter-bank bond market and over the counters of designated commercial banks.

Individual investors can purchase and trade the bonds through pilot commercial banks -- branches of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of China and China Construction Bank.

Interest will be paid every half year, said the ministry in a statement.

The bond sale is part of a planned 1.55 trillion yuan basket the ministry will sell to purchase US$200 billion of foreign exchange from the central bank for the funding of China Investment Corporate, a State-owned foreign exchange investment firm launched in September to better use the country's huge foreign exchange reserves.

At the end of August, the ministry issued 600 billion yuan of special treasury bonds targeting the country's commercial banks with an annual interest rate of 4.3 percent.

The ministry announced on September 10 it would issue 200 billion yuan of special treasury bonds to the general public. A total of 103.38 billion yuan of such bonds have already been made available to the public in three batches.

The bond sale is meant to help ease liquidity, prevent the economy from overheating and strengthen the macro-control policy, according to the ministry.

In theory, a 200-billion-yuan bond sale to the public could have the same effect on excess liquidity as an 0.5-percentage-point rise in bank reserve requirements, said Wang Guogang, a financial expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

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