Colombia to Slow TES Issuance

Colombian TES supply will increase by no more than $2bn net in the coming year, as the country’s ministry of finance looks to give other asset classes more space. “The TES market will grow very little in the next year,” Julio Torres, general director of public credit at the national treasury, tells LatinFinance. “The TES market has been growing a lot, and has been our main source of financing,” Torres says, adding that the idea behind slowing issuance, which is also the bread and butter for the country’s pension funds, is to avoid crowding out infrastructure finance and corporate debt in the pipeline. Colombia will issue around $21bn worth of local currency bonds, mostly domestically, but possibly abroad as well, but that will be largely done to replace the $19bn of TES paper that matures in the next 12 months. So far this year, Colombia has completed 80% of its TES issuance via the sale of $18bn worth of bonds.