Bank of England to start selling emergency gilt purchases from Nov. 29
England #England
LONDON (Reuters) -The Bank of England said on Thursday that later this month it would start to sell off some of the 19 billion pounds ($22 billion) of bonds which it bought to quell market turmoil in the wake of former prime minister Liz Truss’s Sept. 23 mini-budget.
The BoE bought long-dated and index-linked gilts between Sept. 28 and Oct. 14 to halt a fire sale of assets by British pension funds, after some bonds recorded their biggest falls on record.
Last week a senior BoE official, Andrew Hauser, said it was important for these purchases to be reversed in a “timely” way, and that more details would be coming soon.
In a statement on Thursday, the BoE said it would be open to offers from investors to buy the bonds from Nov. 29 onwards.
Unlike the BoE’s separate programme of auctions to unwind some of its more than 830 billion pounds of quantitative easing purchases, these sales will not take place at a fixed pace or schedule.
The BoE said the plan was “a demand-led approach to unwind recent financial stability gilt purchases in a timely but orderly way”.
($1 = 0.8580 pounds)
(Reporting by David Milliken; Editing by Sachin Ravikumar)