, Columnist
China Forgets That Oil Is Liquid
Capital controls present a sticky hurdle for local-currency crude futures.
This article is for subscribers only.
If China is about to start setting the global price of oil, why isn't it setting the price of metals?
After all, the country accounts for about half of worldwide demand for most base metals, compared with just 13 percent or so for crude. The reality is that scale doesn't matter. As Gadfly argued in October, the European Union has long been the world's largest oil-importing trading bloc, but we don't trade West Texas Intermediate in euros.