China Regulators Complete Final ‘Drill’ In Preparation For Petro-Yuan Futures Trading
Amid all the chatter of Venezuela and Russia potentially creating oil-backed cryptocurrencies, the “huge news” of China’s launch of the Petro-Yuan has fallen off the front page… until now.
This week saw the Shanghai Futures Exchange complete its fifth yuan-back oil futures contract trading drill successfully…
As Bloomberg reports, 149 members of Shanghai International Energy Exchange traded 647,930 lots in the drill with total value of 268.2b yuan, according to a statement from the exchange, which added that the system basically met the listing requirements of crude futures after the drill.
While this was a success, it’s not all plain-saling…
As Bloomberg notes, as the world’s largest energy consumer and an increasing source of investment capital for oil-producing nations, China has an interest in using its own currency rather than that of a geopolitical competitor.
One hurdle for setting up a rival to Brent or West Texas Intermediate: Overseas oil producers and traders would need to swallow China’s capital controls and penchant for occasional market interventions.
Similar hurdles have kept foreign investors as bit players in China’s giant mainland stock and bond markets, and the share of payments in Yuan in the Global SWIFT system has fallen…
“This contract has the potential to greatly help China’s push for yuan internationalization,” said Yao Wei, chief China economist at Societe Generale SA in Paris.“But its success will hinge critically on the degree of freedom allowed for the capital flows related to the contract,” she said.
“It is not unreasonable to envision a world in which the overwhelming share of commodity contracts, especially for oil, are no longer denominated just in dollars,” said Eswar Prasad, a former China division chief at the IMF.
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