By Akanimo Sampson
The US-China trade conflict appears to have evolved into a bullish animal. After a plural bouts of tariffs and counter-tariffs, last August 23, Beijing slapped a 5 per cent levy on US crude for the first time, targeting a commodity analysts say is already influenced by the trade tensions, and adding to a swathe of US-origin commodities like propane, Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) and soybeans.
Those who know better say it was part of a wider tariff on $75 billion of US imports into China. US President Donald Trump responded with raising tariffs on $550 billion of Chinese goods, and ordered US companies to “immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.”
Last August, the worsening trade antagonism spilled over into currency, with China allowing the yuan to breach the seven per US dollar level for the first time in 11 years in retaliation for the US imposing new 10% tariffs on $300 billion of Chinese goods. This was followed by the US Treasury officially designating China as a currency manipulator, a move that had been avoided by previous administrations due to its controversial nature.
These developments have taken the trade dispute into uncharted territory, with risks now enveloping everything from international currency and financial markets to global economic growth. The impact on crude oil and other commodity markets too will be felt on many levels, far beyond the reconfiguration of trade flows.
At the beginning of this 2019, governments, businesses and investors were already digging in for a fundamental repositioning of the economic relationship between the US and China, potentially extending well beyond the Trump era. But the yuan devaluation triggered market turmoil and raised the specter of an escalation on several fronts.
Economists at Japan’s Nomura bank said in Augus, “overall, we are maintaining our views that RMB will depreciate on a multi-month basis and reach around 7.20 by end-Q3 2019 and 7.40 by end-2019”, pointing out that the devaluation had created numerous negative risks including the US increasing the tariff rate to 25% on all imports from China before year-end; China allowing for yuan flexibility; the risk of China halting US agriculture purchases; the US refraining from issuing licenses to Huawei; and a lack of long USD forex hedging from Chinese corporates.
Economic Counsellor and Director of the Research Department at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Gita Gopinath, said at a press conference in mid-July that the tariff battles since mid-2018 may reduce global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2020 by 0.5%. “So this is a significant cost to the global economy, and at a time when global trade is already very weak and investment is weak in the world,” Gopinath said, adding that prolonged trade uncertainty was weighing on business sentiment everywhere in the world, which then has implications for demand.
S&P Global Ratings’ Chief Economist, Paul Gruenwald, in early July wrote that the so-called second-order effects of the trade dispute, which were working through the indirect channel of confidence rather than directly through tariff-related price increases, are new. “Where once we had identified them as a downside risk, they have now begun to move into our baseline forecast. These risks are slower moving and cumulatively larger than the first-round effects”, he said.
S&P Global Ratings is expecting a global GDP growth to slip to 3.4% in 2019 and 3.6% in 2020, from 3.7 per cent in 2018.
However, S&P Global Platts is a leading independent provider of information, benchmark prices and analytics for the energy and commodities markets. For over 100 years, it has brought clarity and transparency to the energy and commodities markets, enabling companies, governments and individuals to act with conviction.
Slower global growth is a much bigger threat to underlying oil and commodity demand than the short-term diversion of US-China trade flows, as disruptions are temporary, but weakness in demand is more structural, particularly if a recession is imminent. For the last few years global oil demand growth has been above the 1 million b/d mark, and for the first time in human history global oil demand hit 100 million b/d (depending on who you ask this happened either in 2018 or 2019). Economists are increasingly factoring in the possibility of demand growth falling below the psychologically important 1 million b/d level.
Market concerns were stoked on August 1, when WTI crude oil prices fell 7.9% day-on-day, the largest decline since 2015, after Trump’s unexpected tariff announcement. Warnings were being sounded even in June, when Morgan Stanley slashed its 2019 global oil demand growth estimate to 1 million b/d from 1.2 million b/d, which it said was “broadly half-way between trend growth and a recession scenario.”
Other banks including Citigroup, Barclays, Goldman Sachs and Australia’s ANZ have significantly downgraded their oil demand forecasts in the last two months, with estimates now ranging from just over 1 million b/d to 1.275 million b/d.
S&P Global Platts Analytics slashed its oil demand growth outlook to 1.2 million b/d for 2019, down from 1.5 million b/d in 2018, citing subdued economic growth and global trade.
Separately, Platts Analytics estimated that the US-China struggle over trade will lower diesel demand in the US by 90 million b/d: “In the US, when GDP was growing 4 percent a couple of quarters last year, distillate demand increased 200 million b/d year on year. Now that GDP growth has slowed to two per cent, distillate is in decline with the trade war estimated to be contributing 90 million b/d of negative growth.”
While it was too early to call a recession, oil demand does slow materially or even decline in recessions, by several hundred thousand barrels per day at least, Morgan Stanley said. Senior Commodity Strategist at ANZ, Daniel Hynes, said if world GDP growth fell below three per cent, global oil consumption will fall by one percent to around 99.5 million b/d. “Even without a global recession, we are already seeing demand weaken”, he said, adding that a recession driven one per cent decline would reduce the call on the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) crude to only 30 million b/d in 2019.
The second-round effects of the trade conflict will only worsen. Business sentiment has already soured as Chinese oil corporations shun longer-term oil and gas investments in the US. For the rest of this year, financial market risk and macroeconomic concerns will only exacerbate the decline in physical commodity demand.
