BEIJING: China’s central bank Monday suspended open market operations for a seventh trading day in a row, citing a relatively high level of liquidity in the banking system. With 70 billion yuan (10.3 billion U.S. dollars) of reverse repos maturing on Monday, the same amount of cash was drained from the market by the People’s Bank of China (PBOC).
Altogether 250 billion yuan of reverse repos will mature this week.
Rising fiscal spending near the end of month offset maturing reverse repos, the PBOC said in statements last week. In Monday’s interbank market, the benchmark overnight Shanghai Interbank Offered Rate (Shibor), the cost at which Chinese banks lend to one another, rose by 10.2 basis points to 2.72 percent. China has set the tone of its monetary policy in 2017 as prudent and neutral, keeping an appropriate liquidity level but avoiding excessive liquidity injections.
