The central bank yesterday auctioned another NT$100 billion (US$31.34 billion) in 364-day certificates of deposit, marking its sixth sales of the certificates this year, as it continues to absorb excess funds in the banking system.
These six sales of certificates with a total value of NT$600 billion would be equivalent to hiking the reserve requirement ratio by 2.35 percentage points, the central bank said in a statement.
The auction yielded an average interest rate of 0.624 percent with a bid-to-cover ratio of 3.64 times. That compared with an average interest rate of 0.688 percent for the sales on Aug. 6, which had a bid-to-cover ratio of 3.79 times.
Not only was the average interest rate of the certificates auctioned yesterday lower than that of last month’s auction, it was also lower than the 0.77 percent interest rate for the 182-day certificates sold during open-market operations on Thursday.
Moreover, the overnight interbank rate, which reflects the efficacy of the government’s short-term liquidity controls, remained at relatively low levels. It has increased by a marginal 0.006 percentage points to 0.206 percent since the central bank auctioned long-term certificates last month.
This indicates that liquidity in the market is still abundant. In June, the central bank unexpectedly raised its policy rates by 0.125 percentage points and adopted targeted prudential credit-tightening measures aimed at reining in soaring property prices in the Greater Taipei area.
The central bank is set to hold its quarterly board meeting at the end of this month, with market expectations that it will raise its policy rates by another 0.125 percentage points to 1.5 percent to continue to tame property speculation.
“It’s very likely that the central bank will raise interest rates this month because there’s still a lot of liquidity in the private sector,” Wu Chung-shu (吳中書), an economic research fellow at Academia Sinica said by telephone yesterday.
Wu said that the central bank didn’t need to maintain its interest rates at low levels because it wanted to normalize the rates as well as prevent a housing bubble.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
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