Due to the transition of reporting responsibilities on the secondary market from Sri Lank’s Central Bank to the Public Debt Management Office (PDMO), the Debt Management Office is responsible for carrying on the reporting, Central Bank Governor Dr Nandalal Weerasinghe said on Tuesday (9), at a Committee On Public Finance (COPF) meeting.

Speaking of the process whereby the Bank used to monitor and report real-time fixed-income data on the Bloomberg terminal, he said: “The way we used to capture data was from the Bloomberg platform. They (PDMO) also have been trained to capture data from the Bloomberg platform and then publish it. For whatever reason, recently there probably have been some delays in compiling and publishing it.”

The statement was in response to a query raised by Committee Chairperson Dr Harsha de Silva, who noted the lack of published data on the PDMO website since 4 May.

“You used to give a secondary market transaction summary, every day. The last one was published on 4 May. Today is 9 June. Nothing has been published since then. If you transferred the responsibility to the PDMO, then the PDMO should have continued with this. Suddenly it can’t stop on 4 May.”

Dr De Silva emphasised the importance of the data that had once been accessible at the end of each trading day. “People looked forward to look at what happened in the market. You had the ISIN number, the tenor, the security type, opening yield, closing yield, highest yield, lowest yield, weighted average yield, volume, number of trades, all that was there. So market participants could understand exactly how much, where, what volatility there is, which direction the market is moving, and so on.”

Further, the Committee also discussed the inaccessibility of timely and accurate total Government debt, and other crucial data that is referenced by market participants, academics, and parliamentarians.

“Earlier we used to get fiscal data, before they were published, for our monetary policy purposes. Now, it is published in an advanced-release calendar... Even as the Central Bank, we do not get privileged access to fiscal data now... They are the authority in publishing fiscal data,” Governor Dr Weerasinghe said, referring to the PDMO.

Central Bank Assistant Governor Chaaminda Bandara further elucidated that the transition has delineated authority over data. “Earlier when we ran the Public Debt Office, we as the issuer on behalf of the Government, we did have access to all the market information. Now we are also, as internal investments are coming in, just a participant. We are not privy to any market information as such on individual trades made.”

“Earlier what we used to do was, even the primary issuances we used to upload it onto Bloomberg, now we are not doing any of that. All that is with the PDMO,” Bandara said.

Dr De Silva criticised the PDMO’s published fiscal data, stating that its lack of detailed information, as maintained before by the CBSL, leads to a lack of clarity. “What you used to report is the debt service payment by instrument. You have short-term, with which you know how much bills, how much other rupee loans, treasury bonds etc. – broken down. That helps a person understand exactly what is going on.”

“What the PDMO has is a quarterly four-line table, and that is just domestic, T-bills and T-bonds, external, bilateral, multilateral and market borrowing. It does not give the granularity that one would need to be able to understand what’s really going on. This aggregated data is not very useful.”

“This aggregated data is not very useful... Now it has been restricted.”

De Silva added that the void left in accurate and reliable information has led to speculation within the market. “There are all kinds of volatility in the market. All kinds of people are speculating... If you want to stop the speculation and feed the market with facts, then it doesn't happen.”

“Secondary market trade information is critically important for the market to assess where the interest rates are moving. They need to know how to bid the next day. If that is not available, people will bid haywire, or insider information will rule the day.”