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Oil Just Isn’t That Important to Petrocurrencies Right Now

Unread postPosted: Tue 24 Oct 2017, 10:45:10
by AdamB
Foreign inflows trump crude as biggest driver of ruble Latin American currencies move in opposite direction to oil The currencies of some of the world’s biggest crude exporters are breaking their historic relationship with the oil price. The Canadian dollar has weakened, the Norwegian krone is little changed and the Russian ruble has strengthened just 4 percent in the past three months even as the price of Brent crude has surged 16 percent and West Texas oil 10 percent. In commodity-rich Latin America, the 90-day correlation between currencies and oil turned negative last month for the first time since 2014. Commodity currencies are typically more correlated with oil when it is falling because a decline in prices often indicates a drop in demand, which is disproportionately damaging to energy-dependent economies. The link rose during the 2015-16 oil price slump, but now that


Oil just not all that important to petrocurrencies

Re: Oil Just Isn’t That Important to Petrocurrencies Right N

Unread postPosted: Sat 28 Oct 2017, 09:49:43
by Subjectivist
This is written very confusingly. If I grok the authors meaning for Latin America outside of VZ oil is a useful export commodity but not a big deal like it is in Norway, Russia or the OPEC states. This seems self evident because most oil produced in Latin America is consumed locally, not exported for income.

Re: Oil Just Isn’t That Important to Petrocurrencies Right N

Unread postPosted: Mon 30 Oct 2017, 12:34:10
by ROCKMAN
Sub - I agree. So decided to step back and look at the big picture. In doing so the idea of the "petrodollar" (better stated as the petrocurrency) seems increasingly less important. Total export trade in 2016 != $16 trillion. Total oil export trade the same year = $710 billion. Or about 5% of all global export trade is represented by oil exports.

What the numbers do indicate is how the production of fossil fuels is critical to the global export trade: how much export trade would take place if there were significantly less ff?

Re: Oil Just Isn’t That Important to Petrocurrencies Right N

Unread postPosted: Mon 30 Oct 2017, 13:23:45
by Outcast_Searcher
ROCKMAN wrote:Sub - I agree. So decided to step back and look at the big picture. In doing so the idea of the "petrodollar" (better stated as the petrocurrency) seems increasingly less important. Total export trade in 2016 != $16 trillion. Total oil export trade the same year = $710 billion. Or about 5% of all global export trade is represented by oil exports.

What the numbers do indicate is how the production of fossil fuels is critical to the global export trade: how much export trade would take place if there were significantly less ff?

Stepping back like that sounds like a good idea.

It's not real easy to find a time series showing annual international merchandise exports through 2016, at least by my casual searches.

Looking at merchandise exports through 2014 (which are dependent on shipping energy, (unlike non-merchandise trade, which includes services, investments, and capital flows, per Wiki, which sounds reasonable), it looks to me like merchandise trade is more correlated to GDP than the price of oil.

Looking at periods like 1999-2000, and 2006-2010, for example -- it looks like global merchandise exports were reacting far more strongly to overall economic events than the price of oil to me. From 1998 to 2007 the price of oil was basically straight up as a trend. Global merchandise exports looks nothing like that.

Was modest international merchandise exports in 2011 - 2014 due to modest global economic growth, or fairly high oil prices, or both? (I don't know, just looking at different periods).

I'd like to see good figures for 2015 through 2017, and see how cheap oil prices and a "meh" global economy looked, to get more of a sense of this.

https://www.wto.org/english/res_e/stati ... hart01.pdf

Re: Oil Just Isn’t That Important to Petrocurrencies Right N

Unread postPosted: Tue 31 Oct 2017, 12:16:41
by ROCKMAN
Outcast - Great points and nice data. But export volumes will hang on more then just the energy costs for shipping. I suspect you would agree. There's the cost of producing the products as well as the available income of the buyers to pay for those imports.

But I suspect the dynamic is just to complex to clearly break out the individual components. Just consider deconvolving the complexity of the feedback loops. But as we seem to agree: stepping way back and looking at the BIG PICTURE in a qualitive vs quantitive manner might be more meaningful.