A few months ago, a piece of news shook the global oil future market: yuan-denominated oil contracts have begun trading for the first time in Shanghai on March 26, 2018. By widening the gaze beyond the next few years, this fact is poised to change how oil (a potentially other commodities and hard assets) are traded globally. It is obvious to register this will enhance the role of the yuan as a global trading currency, and compel investors to increase their allocations to Chinese financial assets.
Some facts to begin with: China became the world’s largest oil consumer at the end of 2016 (source: Bloomberg). As a consequence of this achievement, China is progressively manifesting a strong desire to pay for its huge import bill in its own currency, rather than resorting to employ USD. Additionally, China’s quite open aspiration with this new oil trading plan is to promote the internationalization of yuan and it intends to achieve this goal by aggressively promoting a wider adoption of the yuan as a global trading currency. Switching to yuan payments for major imports is a fundamental cornerstone of this process and the internationalization of the yuan is clearly one of the main priorities now for People’s Bank of China and other Chinese regulators.
Shall this plan be successful (at least to a certain degree in the short run), China can start thinking about replicating this model for other commodities purchases. Furthermore, the Chinese are, according to a number of sources, planning to devise active measures to persuade oil exporting countries to accept payment for their crude oil in yuan, which would be the logical next step from the new futures contract.
The emergence of petro-yuan revenues collected by the world’s largest oil producers is a natural development from this process and it is expected to become the third global price benchmark alongside Brent and West Texas Intermediate crude. As evidence of the seriousness of the Chinese new policy, a few top global energy traders, such as Glencore and Trafigura, have decided to start trading in the new contracts.
Carl Weinberg, chief economist and managing director at High Frequency Economics, in a recent interview stated: “Moving oil trade out of dollars into yuan will take right now between $600 billion and $800 billion worth of transactions out of the dollar… (That) means a stronger demand for things in China, whether it is securities or whether it is goods and services. It is a growth plus for China and that’s why they want this to happen”.
Obviously, the petro-yuan will encounter many challenges on its way of various nature: the most evident is the exchange policy designed by China in the past two decades. In 1994 the Chinese Yuan was pegged to the US Dollar, and it was only in 2005 that the country shifted to a “managed float” system and was allowed to appreciate. It now fluctuates in the forex market in accordance with a basket of major foreign currencies, and the Chinese government has always been very keen to keep the yuan undervalued as it is understandably a means of promoting the country’s exports.
Arguably, in order to be able to gain the investor confidence and to sustain the even greater capital inflows, Chinese policy maker might have to be forced to reconsider China’s exchange rate policy to render it more sustainable and, equally important, insulated from external shocks. This state of affairs may prove to be unattainable given the theorem of the “Impossible Trinity” which states that it is impossible, for any given country, to maintain the following three at the same time: a fixed foreign exchange rate, a regime of free capital movement (or absence of capital controls), and an independent monetary policy.
On the other side of the world, the most relevant oil actor, Saudi Arabia, seems to remain firmly committed to the dollar peg for its currency, the riyal, which has been in place for more than 30 year, and to the continued dominance of the US dollar as the medium of payment for its main export. However, the petro-yuan future contract represents an unplanned and (possibly) uncontrollable variable in Aramco’s long-term strategic planning. Aramco is the Saudi’ state controlled oil company the value of which is estimated in several hundreds of US billions
On the other hand, Saudi Arabia may benefit from the introduction of the petro –Yuan future contract in the light of the magnitude of its commercial partnership with China: the petro-yuan may ensure the establishment of a long-term eastern market for crude oil in the world’s biggest oil-consuming economy and furnish a hedge against the surge in American oil exports triggered by the shale boom.
Similarly Russia, the largest oil producer in the world, has welcomed the petro-yuan future contract with one of the national champions, Gazprom, having already made the switch from the US dollar to the yuan and other Asian currencies. The diffusion of the petro-yuan future contract will greatly benefit the Russian state politically as it allows her to further reduce its dependency on the United States (and capital denominated in US dollars) and weakens the US’ ability to wage economic war and conduct currency wars.
Nonetheless, in the long term, the petro-yuan future contract may offer a win-win solution for the two contenders on the ongoing trade and tariff war (namely, USA and China).
Let’s explore the underpinning reasons why it could turn out to be a good deal for both countries:
- Despite the good premises and the warm welcome it has received so far, it will take many years for Chinese oil futures to establish themselves as an alternative benchmark in the oil market.
- If the prediction above is correct, the petro-yuan future contract will have an insubstantial impact on the US economy in the short term; nonetheless, it could help to lower the value of the US dollar against other foreign currencies.
- A slightly weaker US dollar may, in turn, make US dollar denominated exports more competitive in global markets, thus allowing the US to narrow their trade deficit, particularly with China.
