How Long the Dollar as World Currency?

BTL in a recent post, Anon asked for views on how much of the present ME unpleasantness is explained by US desire to maintain the dollar as the currency in which the world buys oil?   Anon went on to mention that Gaddafi head been mooting a barter scheme to circumvent dealing in dollars before his demise.

This is quite a long post so I'll summarise here: not really plausible, IMHO. 

It's not an academic response, nor does it contain any quantified macro-economics (my being in neither profession): but after a career in pragmatic multinational micro-economics - the energy business - I do have a number of practical observations.

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1.  Liquidity / critical mass is vital in every sector.  Nothing stymies business worse than non-fungibility and non-convertability.   Needless to say, if anything that has "currency" today is doing a halfway satisfactory job in the market, that militates strongly against the adoption of anything else.  The intertia / barriers to entry & exit are great.

2.  There have long been plenty of national-pride-based attempts to drag the commercial world away from Anglo-US dominance of the instruments of liquidity.  In my own sphere: many countries hate having their oil priced against Brent (which almost all crude oil is, except US production), let alone in dollars; and there have been attempts to establish marker-prices for other blends, and to have them traded in other financial centres.  Kuwait Blend; Urals Blend, Dubai ... they come along, they get reduced to a basis-differential against Brent, and the world carries on.  And this despite apparently formidable technical difficulties in maintaining "Brent" as a marker (due to terminally declining North Sea production).  But the clever chaps in London cunningly keep extending the definition of the blend and - thus far - they've had total success.

Likewise, and to Anon's question, lots of folks have dreamed of having oil - even just their own local production grades - priced in their own currencies.  You might justly argue that provided there is full FX convertability between those currencies and USD, what's to stop them?  Answer: nothing - except it would be entirely empty.  The whole business world speaks English (and reads the FT), not Russian or Mandarin.  Arbitrage ensures "their" price would always be (Brent USD +/- basis)*FX.

As regards barter schemes ... well, money was invented, partly because there are distinct, nay fatal limitations as to what barter can achieve.  So I don't think Gaddafi represented any kind of threat to dollar oil trade.   BTW, the Russians have tried to sell gas to China in complex packages with industrial equipment - but the Chinese are having none of it!  Cash on the nail, so far as they are concerned.

3.  Some things do change & evolve: but typically only for very good reasons (which do not include national pride).  Example: the first natural gas trading hub in Europe was the UK's "NBP", and European gas prices for many years were given as NBP (+/- basis).  How logical was this, when the UK isn't remotely the centre of gravity of European gas movements, and the Eu deals mostly in EUR?  Very logical indeed - when only the UK's gas market was truly liquid.  However, over time, unsurprisingly several other hubs emerged as the rest of the EU belatedly caught up on gas trading (well, sort-of), one of which - the Dutch TTF -  was very much closer to the continental centre of gravity than our peripheral island market.  A German hub would have been just as likely a candidate: but the Germans genuinely don't understand how markets work, and screwed up their market design.  The Dutch are much better at it: and so today the TTF is more usually given as reference point for "the gas price in Europe".  (By the way, NBP and TTF trade at incredibly high correlations and the basis differential is always easily rationalised - as you'd expect, because they are both liquid, and generally inter-connected physically.)

4.  So: given that things can change over time and with good fundamental reasons, who's to rule out everything coming under Chinese hegemony in the long run, when their economy becomes dominant?  Well, in the very long run, maybe.  But right now they don't really understand markets either, nor indeed quite How The World Works.  Case in point: they'd spent years cultivating Gaddafi (for his oil), and were gobsmacked when "the West" just did away with him one day.   WTF?, you could hear them saying.   And, to their disgust, right now large & mainstream Chinese firms are obliged to, errrr, kowtow to US sanctions on Iran, much as they'd like to exploit the situation commercially. 

Of course, they hate this stuff and have every intention of supplanting it.  One day.  And who knows, maybe Trump will so overplay his hand, he'll help them accelerate the process.

Then again, the French have long hated the use of the English language everywhere - and most specifically in the organs and councils of the EU.  Tough titty, mes braves; not even Brexit is going to change that. 

No lengthy post is complete without an army anecdote.  All army vehicles come with a comprehensive toolkit.  But as I quickly discovered when becoming responsible for a troop of 30 vehicles, there's only one item out of a dozen or so that's ever taken out of the box, and which is permanently going missing - the Spanner Adjustable.  

Yes: some things turn out to be Really Useful.  The English language, the Brent oil contract, and the Almighty USD are excellent examples.  The clever Chinese will need to come up with something even better if they want any of them to be superceded.

ND

Currency Wars

This post is brought to you by site sponsor spreadbetmagazine.com

It is rather worrying how little coverage there is in the Western media about the increasingly nasty escalation of the China-Japan stand-off over a few small islands. The Arab Spring which was galvanized through the enormous power of social media may have parallels in China given the strangle hold the authorities have there over main stream media - social media is rather more difficult to keep the reins on…
In  the markets this week ,the big factor continuing to reverberate around the globe is the de-facto potentially unlimited US Quantitative Easing. This huge round of monetary easing is unparalleled in the US and the world to date including Japan.
Back when QE started in 2009 I forecast that it was a ‘Pringles’ event – once started you just can’t stop. And so Ben Bernanke is proving. Many Countries around the world are not unsurprisingly, no particularly enamoured by this new course of money printing. US dollar devaluation only makes it more difficult for developing economies to grow as their products become more expensive on global markets.
The US, by printing money, is trying to generate inflation to help it wipe outs its debt. This inflation though is also being felt in other countries. Their response is to also to try and reduce the value of the currencies through their own forms of QE.
With the dollar falling, there are some potential lucrative investment gains to be made. As the dollar falls, risk assets gain. Also as the dollar falls, the other side of the equation is that the “pair” currencies strengthen, particularly of havens like the Swiss Franc and the Norwegian Krone. Similarly, commodities also generally rise. It is quite hard to see how more money printing in the US and elsewhere does not underpin commodity prices – given the value destruction in the mining sector this year that itself provides a good long-term position for finding value - a stance that is opined in the current edition of spreadbet magazine - http://issuu.com/spreadbetmagazine/docs/spreadbet-magazine-v9_generic.

Finally, in terms of opportunities presented through a falling dollar, this also pushes up food prices. There is of course quite rightly a stigma attached to betting on food prices but spreads and ETF’s are offered.

Below is the HSBC graph of the effects of QE on the dollar – it does work in lowering the dollar and this in turn sets off a competitive devaluation in other currencies around the world. It provides the only solution governments can think of to the current sovereign debt crisis and this is to devalue their debt instead of paying it off as the burden is too large.

The currency wars are here to stay and traders should look to this as a theme to underpin their trading strategies in 2012/13.