The new ten-year green federal bond met with cautious interest on Wednesday.
According to the finance agency responsible for debt management, the offer of 3.5 billion euros was in demand with 3.7 billion euros.
In comparison, orders for Spain's first green government bond on Tuesday amounted to 60 billion euros.
The offer of 5 billion euros was oversubscribed twelve times.
Markus Frühauf
Editor in business.
Follow I follow
There is a technical reason for the low demand for what is now the fourth green federal bond: This time the finance agency opted for the auction process, in which the banks from the federal issues bidding group submit bids. The syndicate procedure was chosen for the first green federal bond issues. Here, the consortium banks specifically address investors, which means that the order volume is usually significantly higher than in the auction process.
However, the waning interest can be seen in the fact that only 21 out of the 33-bank group of bidders took part in the most recent auction. Almost 3.2 billion euros were allocated to them, 302 million euros went into the federal government's own holdings. The arithmetical average return for the paper was minus 0.38 percent. Last year, the first green federal bond was issued, also for a period of ten years. At that time, the offer of 6.5 billion euros was still in demand for 33 billion euros.
The green government bond with the highest demand so far was the Italian debut issue in early March. The title with the unusual term of 24 years attracted an interest of 80 billion euros with an issue volume of 8.5 billion euros. This record could be broken in October. Because then the European Union wants to issue its first green bond. The debut issue has been delayed a little because it was previously scheduled for September. The EU bonds are very popular, so there have already been some issues with a demand of more than 100 billion euros.