2023-08-16 13:13:21
The appetite for Spanish debt remains among individual investors, who are looking for safe assets to place their savings while banks continue to be reluctant to raise the remuneration of deposits.
What’s more, the Treasury can now allow itself to slightly lower the interest offered in its short-term auctions, given an excess demand that translates into that moderation of what the State pays to place its debt.
As happened a week ago in one-year bills, the agency under the Ministry of Economy has awarded this Wednesday 1,524.98 million euros at a marginal interest rate of 3.7%, eleven basis points less than 3, 81% offered in the auction prior to the same term. The demand was for 3,462.47 million euros. In other words, it has more than doubled the figure finally awarded.
In the shortest-term auction, of three-month bills, the Treasury placed 523.04 million euros (compared to a demand of 1,889.43 million), with a marginal interest rate of 3.535% slightly higher than the previous 3.531% .
good alternative
After the placement, and despite the reduction in profitability, the 9-month reference continues to give more than the 12-month bills, which paid 3.682% in the last issue on August 8. In the same way, both easily beat what is offered by bank deposits. According to data from the European Central Bank (ECB), Spanish banks had been remunerating this type of conservative product at 2.22% at the end of June. The figure is still below the average for the euro zone and far from the returns of more than 3.5% that are around in countries like Estonia, France or Italy.
The refusal that the banks – at least, the big ones in the sector – have been showing to transfer the rise in interest rates to the savings of their clients has caused, precisely, that the demand for Letters has skyrocketed in recent months.
In fact, and according to Treasury data at the end of May (the latest published), individuals had increased their holdings of bills to 14,947 million euros. A figure much higher than the 1,826 million accumulated at the end of 2022 and that has been growing exponentially from the 16 million that were barely registered at the beginning of that year. And this taking into account that the statistics only include the data of individuals who visit Bank of Spain branches.
Individuals, in fact, have now accounted for 20.91% of all this type of debt in circulation, from the 2.44% they represented at the end of last year. The balance is thus definitively tilted towards this group, which already even exceeds the volume of bills accumulated by resident banks, which at the end of May stood at 13,720 million, representing 19.19% of the total.
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