CBO issues treasury bills worth OMR16mn

Muscat: Oman’s central bank raised OMR16 million by way of allotting treasury bills on Tuesday.
The treasury bills are for a maturity period of 182 days, from November 7, 2018 until May 8, 2019.
The average accepted price reached 98.768 for every OMR100, and the minimum accepted price arrived at 98.650 per OMR100. Whereas the average discount rate and the average yield reached 2.47115 per cent and 2.50204 per cent, respectively.
The interest rate on the Repo operations with CBO is 2.816 per cent for the period from November 6, 2018 to November 12, 2018 while the discount rate on the Treasury Bills Discounting Facility with CBO is 3.566 per cent, for the same period.
The treasury bills are short-term highly secured financial instruments issued by the CBO on behalf of the Government, which helps the licensed commercial banks to gainfully invest their surplus funds, with added advantage of ready liquidity through discounting and repurchase facilities (Repo) offered by the Central Bank.
Further, treasury bills promote the local money market by creating a benchmark yield curve for short-term interest rates. Also, the Government (MOF) may also resort to this instrument whenever felt necessary for financing its recurrent expenditures.