April 6 (SeeNews) - Croatia's central bank, HNB, said on Monday it has injected 1.52 billion kuna ($215 million/199 million euro) into the banking system through a regular open market operation, as demand jumped.
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, HNB said in a data release.
The settlement date for Monday's auction is April 8 and the maturity date is April 15.
This was HNB's fourth such auction since November 2018. Demand at this week's auction was considerably higher than last week, when HNB placed 350 million kuna with local banks in a regular open market operation.
Prior to that, it had placed 1.5 billion kuna in two regular open market operation - half of them extended at a fixed interest rate of 0.05% and the other half at 0.30%, and a further 3.8 billion kuna in a five-year structural repo auction, at a fixed interest rate of 0.25%.
Last month, HNB also started buying treasury bonds, aiming to maintain the stability of the government debt market.
In addition, HNB intervened five times on the foreign exchange market in March, selling a total of 2.24 billion euro to local banks in order to support 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 = 7.62663 kuna)