China's central bank continues to skip open market operations

BEIJING - China's central bank on Friday skipped open market operations for the sixth consecutive trading day, citing sufficient liquidity in the banking system.

"Rising fiscal expenditure near year-end is sufficient to offset factors such as maturing reverse repos and keep the banking system liquidity at a high level," the People's Bank of China (PBOC) said on its website.

Some 50 billion yuan ($7.7 billion) of reverse repos matured Friday, meaning that market liquidity will drop by the same amount. A total of 290 billion yuan of liquidity has been drained from the market this week.

A reverse repo is a process by which the central bank purchases securities from commercial banks through bidding, with an agreement to sell them back in the future.

The PBOC said earlier that it would conduct open market operations in a flexible way to meet the seasonal liquidity needs of banks near year-end.

China will continue a prudent and neutral monetary policy in 2018 as the world's second-largest economy strives to balance growth with risk prevention.

"Prudent monetary policy should be kept neutral, the floodgates of monetary supply should be controlled, and credit and social financing should see reasonable growth," said a statement released last week after the Central Economic Work Conference.