AOFM shifts auction supplier

The Australian Office of Financial Management sold $1.1 billion of CGS last week, with the second bond tender being for only $500 million of bonds instead of $600 million, as had become the pattern under this new issuance program.

Wednesday's issue of $600 million of May 2013 bonds achieved an average yield of 3.48 per cent and was 4.1 times oversubscribed. Friday's issue of $501 million of May 2021 bonds achieved an average yield of 4.52 per cent and was 3.9 times over subscribed. No German bunds here.

There was also fresh talk, published in the Financial Review today, of the Australian government in some fashion supporting the debt programs of state and territory governments. Spreads on semi-government bonds have increased over the course of the credit crunch and states are now fretting at the cost of their debt servicing obligations.

Meanwhile the AOFM also said it would conduct bond tenders in future using a new supplier of auction software.

Yieldbroker are the new supplier, replacing Bloomberg, the supplier since 2006. Auctions had been run using the Reserve Bank of Australia's RITS system for many years before that.

The Bloomberg auction platform provided a convenient way to register bids but left some clerical work for AOFM staff in actually sorting the bids and running the auction.

The Yieldbroker platform will automate the sorting and pricing, and speed up the current delay in announcing the result and the pricing of the tender, a delay that in recent weeks ranged between one and three minutes.