MNI BRIEF: More Treasuries Trading Data To Be Made Public

The U.S. Treasury Department could soon release transaction data for on-the-run nominal coupons, Under Secretary for Domestic Finance Nellie Liang said Wednesday, without specifying a timeline for the move.

"We are proposing to provide transaction-level transparency to the public, starting gradual and in a calibrated way. We will walk, not run," she said in a keynote address at a New York Fed conference on increasing resiliency in the Treasury market. Liang said it would include "appropriate cap sizes" and end-of-day dissemination.

In response to commentary that the information could hinder larger trades, she pointing to data from FINRA’s TRACE that has indicated the time needed to trade a large block in the on-the-runs is typically less than 10 minutes.

"We agree that information for very large trades should be released cautiously, with the actual size of the trade masked at the point of dissemination, similar to practices used for other fixed income markets," she said, noting precise “cap sizes” may be tiered. Regulators have also been looking at data gaps in the non-centrally cleared bilateral repo market.