Arab governments or their investment arms may soon buy Egyptian treasury bills to help the government reduce the highest borrowing costs since 2008, Egypt's Deputy Prime Minister Hazem El Beblawi said. Egypt is in talks with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to buy the instruments, El Beblawi, who is also the country's finance minister, said in an interview in Washington Thursday, where he is attending the annual meetings of the IMF and the World Bank. “It can materialize anytime but we have not yet finalized the agreement,” he said. “We are really concerned about increasing interest rates,” Bloomberg quoted him as saying. The chaos weakened the pound and prompted foreign investors to cut holdings of government debt. The Central Bank of Egypt canceled the sale of two- and three-year bonds on Sept. 19 after domestic investors demanded yields that authorities deemed high, according to a government official who declined to be identified. Egypt raised 7.5 billion pounds ($1.3 billion) through the sale of six-month and one-year treasury bills on Sept. 22. The average yield on 182-day notes advanced 10 basis points, or 0.1 percentage point, to 13.338 percent, the highest since October 2008, according to central bank data. The average yield on one-year securities rose six basis points to 13.882 percent.
