Equity 7 February 2025, 3:57pm

Hungary EcoMin reveals a surprising fact about retail government securities

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According to a Facebook post by Hungary's Economy Minister Márton Nagy, since the beginning of the year, 139 billion forints more has been invested in government bonds than withdrawn from them. This means that despite the disappearance of high interest rates, there has been no net capital outflow from government bonds in the period after the first interest payments.

According to the minister's post, between the beginning of the year and 4 February,

households increased their holdings of government securities by about HUF 139 billion,
a total of HUF 924 billion in government securities were purchased, while HUF 785 billion in government securities held by households were sold or matured,
and almost HUF 315 billion in interest payments on government securities were made.

Of the interest payments on retail government bonds, 44% were reinvestments in Hungarian government securities.

And according to the post, 56% is available to the public, which has either already been injected into the economy or is still in cash accounts. It is also interesting to note that since the end of January 2025, more than HUF 100 billion have been transferred out of their Treasury money accounts by customers affected by the January interest rate payment dates.

The figures above also show how much more new government securities were held by households on 4 February than what we learned from the Government Debt Management Agency's (ÁKK) special report on retail holdings of government securities in the first five weeks of 2025.

As the gross sales of retail government securities in the first five weeks of the year amounted to HUF 688 billion, based on the HUF 924 billion reported by the minister, including institutional government securities purchased by the public and the sales of the first two days of the 6th week,

households have bought HUF 236 billion more government securities so far this year than the data on retail government securities published by the ÁKK showed on Monday.