March 30 (SeeNews) - Croatia's central bank said it injected on Monday 350 million kuna ($51 million/46 million euro) into the banking system through a regular open market operation.
The central bank accepted all of the offers in the auction at a fixed interest rate of 0.05%, unchanged from the rate in last week's auction, the central bank, HNB, said in a statement.
The settlement date for Monday's auction is April 1 and the maturity date is April 8.
This was HNB's third such auction since November 2018. The demand at this week's auction was lower than last week, when HNB placed a total of 750 million kuna with local banks in a regular operation.
Prior to that, a week earlier, it had placed 4.45 billion kuna in two parallel open market auctions, as part of its measures to provide additional liquidity to local banks amidst the coronavirus crisis. Back then, the central bank placed 3.8 billion kuna in a five-year structural repo auction, at a fixed interest rate of 0.25%, and a further 750 million kuna at a fixed interest rate of 0.30% in a regular open market operation.
Earlier in March, HNB also started buying treasury bonds, aiming to maintain the stability of the government debt market.
In addition, HNB has intervened three times on the foreign exchange market so far this month, selling a total of 1.21 billion euro to local banks in order to prop up weakening kuna currency. HNB's euro sale on the interbank market was its first such intervention in almost four and a half years.
(1 euro = 7.61402 kuna)