SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Brazil's central bank will kick off the rollover of currency swaps that expire early in October on Monday by offering fewer daily contracts than it did last month, a sign it wants to slow a recent strengthening of the real, the bank said in a statement late on Friday.
The bank said it will auction as many as 6,000 currency swaps - derivatives that provide protection against losses in the real - as part of its strategy to renew $6.677 billion (4.09 billion pound) worth of swaps that expire on Oct. 1.
Last month it offered as many as 10,000 contracts per day to roll over some $9 billion worth of swaps that expired on Sept. 1, renewing about 88 percent of those contracts.
If the central bank keeps the new rollover pace intact until the end of the month, it will be able to renew about 76 percent of the Oct. 1 maturities.
The regular sale of swaps has been part of a successful central bank program of intervention in the foreign exchange market, which has helped the real
The real closed on Friday at 2.2386 per dollar.
(Reporting by Raquel Stenzel; Writing by Asher Levine and Caroline Stauffer; Editing by Dan Grebler)