2016-05-24

China's Debt Fueled Oil Flood

ZH: Why China Is Being Flooded With Oil: Billions In Underwater OPEC Loans Repayable In Crude
The summary is fascinating: China is being flooded with oil, on one hand due to ongoing purchases, but to a large extent because its oil-exporting counterparts (who need to remain on good terms with lender of last resort China) are scrambling to repay their Chinese loans by shipping out record amount of oil in the direction of China, so much so that even China's infrastructure can no longer handle the inbound traffic. As Bloomberg notes, "ships continue to be held up at Qingdao. At least 16 oil tankers with capacity to carry 21.2 million barrels have stayed near the port for more than 10 days over May 1-23. Half of them were there for more than a month."

How this unprecedented dynamic plays out, is at this point impossible to predict, but with such dramatic pockets of zero-sum inefficiency, where half of OPEC-loss is China's gain, we eagerly look forward to the conclusion and how it will impact the price of oil.
China will probably make out on the deal if they can sit on the oil long enough, they might end up making a lot of money depending on the price moves. The borrowers made bad deals. If you agree to repay in barrels of oil, the debt should be denominated in barrels. If that were the case, these countries would have counter-cyclical liabilities that fell along with their ability to pay and they wouldn't be in such bad shape. China made lots of pro-cyclical bets too though, so it's not like anyone had a monopoly on high time preference.

No comments:

Post a Comment