Month: March 2022

One of the wake-up calls during the still on-going Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is how the market witnessed the US and EU utilising the powerful tool of economic warfare by barring Russia from accessing its billions of foreign reserves (except using the reserves for energy payments.) As a result of this sanction imposed against Russia, calls have been raised for the need for alternative holdings.

Being the top holder of foreign currency reserves with $3.22 trillion as of January 2022, with over two and a half times more than the second-largest reserve holder, as well as a friend of Russia, it will come as no surprise if China decides to unshackle itself from the dollar-dominated system in order to reduce their reliance on US dollar.

De-dollarisation is not only limited to China, it is reported by The Wall Street Journal that “Saudi Arabia is in active talks with Beijing to price some of its oil sales to China in yuan,” a move that could further erode US dollar reserve currency’s status. And one should also notice that the Middle East, led by Bahrain and the UAE, is setting up some of the world’s largest crypto exchanges spearheaded by FTX (who have decided to leave HK) and Binance.

No matter how the war of tragedy unfolds, it has signalled to some countries the need to reduce their reliance on SWIFT – the global messaging system between banks to ensure financial security. In fact, Russia’s central bank has developed its own alternative to Swift called the System for Transfer of Financial Messages since 2014, when the US government threatened to disconnect Russia from SWIFT. But it is nowhere near as big as the former.

Having said that, with cryptocurrencies becoming more mainstream, the long race to catch up may not be necessarily if blockchain technology is here to provide a powerful alternative to the legacy global messaging system in the coming years.

Blockchain as a backbone for global finance may still be remote, but we have witnessed how crypto has marked its place in the war.

With Ukraine’s central bank limiting its citizens from withdrawing foreign currency, some Ukrainians have turned to crypto as an alternative. Crypto trading volume on Ukraine’s Kuna Exchange had surged 200% in the last week of February, reaching its highest level since May 2021. The country has also raised over $50 million in crypto donation, as indicated on its official donation website.

Source: CoinGecko

On the other hand, crypto could also be used as an escape route for Russia.

The fact that cryptocurrencies cannot be frozen (let’s rule out centralised crypto wallets for now), has made these tokens an extremely important tool. The Bank of Russia has been developing the digital rubles and has already started the pilot stage of its CBDC before the war began. The call to ban selective Russian banks from the international payment system may have motivated the Russian government to speed up the progress.

Despite no clear evidence of Russians rushing to crypto for a safe haven as information is limited about the country lately, we are witnessing regulators around the world ramping up their efforts in the cryptocurrencies space. Perhaps one of the motives behind this could also be the attempt to close any potential loopholes in the sanctions. While we hope that the conflict can be quickly resolved, if sanctions have become a norm rather than exception, we should all think about what self-sovereignty means to our wealth.

The global CBDC race

On 9^th March 2022, US President Joe Biden signed an executive order on digital assets, including cryptocurrencies. While the order did not specifically launch any new policies, but only guidelines for the upcoming steps, it marked the first official strategy on digital assets set forth by the US government and has given the crypto industry the regulatory clarity that has been long sought after.

The executive order outlined a number of policy priorities and risks related to the implications brought by digital assets, first and foremost is customer and investor protection, followed by financial stability and systematic risk, national security, energy demand and climate change, etc. The executive order contains a well balance of discussion on both the opportunities and risks.

No commitments were made to a US Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), but the executive order specifically called for the “urgency” for the Fed to double down their research on CBDC. We see this as a pursuit to put the US on a level playing field with China who has launched its CBDC pilot last month.

Just days after the executive order was signed, the European Parliament voted to advance a draft of the Markets in Crypto Assets bill, or MiCA, which is a regulatory framework for crypto assets that has been in development since 2018. A lot of similarities could be found between the executive order and the MiCA.

The uniform framework for the EU’s 27 member states also covers rules on supervision, consumer protection and environmental sustainability of crypto assets. An earlier addition to the bill that aimed to limit the use of cryptocurrencies powered by the energy-intensive consensus mechanism known as proof-of-work, which essentially means banning crypto such as Bitcoin and Ethereum in the EU, was voted down by the committee.

Alternatively, the committee voted in favour of a proposal to include crypto-assets mining in EU taxonomy for sustainable activities by 2025 to reduce carbon footprint. The EU has begun its digital euro project since July 2021 and the current investigation phase is expected to take two years. One thing to note is that the MiCA will not be applied to CBDCs.

While the US and the EU have just started with the entrée, China is enjoying the dessert. After eight years in development, China has debuted the digital yuan, its version of CBDC, during the Beijing Winter Olympic Games last month, subsequent to its trial launched in late 2019. According to the data released by the Chinese government, the digital yuan was accepted by more than 8 million merchants and over RMB 87 billion in transaction value was reached as of the end of last year. The next step for China would be to follow its plan outlined in the 14^th Five-Year Plan, further expanding the development of the digital currency alongside its digital economy.

Image Source: Kyodo

Last but not least, the Hong Kong Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury released a letter through his blog yesterday, announcing the government’s latest development in regulating the virtual asset industry. Although there is no explicit timeline for the next steps, the letter highlighted the government’s consideration to introduce a new licensing regime for virtual assets service providers in accordance with the requirement imposed by the Financial Action Task Force which requires all virtual assets exchanges to apply for a license from the Securities and Futures Commission.

If 2021 was marked as the year that made crypto and NFT broke out of their niche, 2022 would be the year of crypto regulation. And with over 80 countries currently exploring a CBDC, we think digital currencies are here to stay and disrupt the traditional financial system. These are still early days for CBDCs and we do not know how fast and far they will go.

But we are excited.

 

Reference:

https://data.imf.org/regular.aspx?key=61280813

https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-arabia-considers-accepting-yuan-instead-of-dollars-for-chinese-oil-sales-11647351541

https://donate.thedigital.gov.ua/

http://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2022-02/23/content_5675094.htm

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/cbdctracker/

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Who would’ve thought that someone is willing to pay a hefty price for turds? Although some might find this to be stomach-churning, it is a reality. According to Bloomberg, manure is selling for USD 40 to 70 per ton, an all-time high level since 2012.

Major reasoning behind this phenomenon could be traced from the ongoing fertiliser crisis, especially from one of its key ingredients: ammonia.

Ammonia is a compound of nitrogen and hydrogen (NH3). The high nitrogen component, a key macronutrient for plants, makes ammonia an essential feedstock for all nitrogen-based fertilisers. Alternatively, it can be applied directly to the soil as well.

Based on our study, the dynamic of ammonia market is reflecting today’s problems on multiple fronts, namely: supply chain, agricultural, energy, and geopolitical tension. Its price performance is a perfect example of what could happen when an inelastic demand faces a serious setback in supply.

Perhaps, ammonia could be good long exposure for the ongoing problems in the world. Below is our learning on this matter:

The now deep-pocketed farmers could afford the unprecedented upswings of ammonia price

The soaring price of ammonia has a profound impact on the agriculture market as fertilisers typically contribute up to 20% of in-farm cash costs. The ammonia market, however, is also affected by the agriculture market as the chemical is their essential derivative demand – 80% of ammonia use case comes from fertiliser.

Given such a relationship, ammonia price can only elevate that much for a considerable time because there are people who are willing to pay for it. In this case, it is the farmers who account for most of the demand.

As of 23 February 2022, the Bloomberg agriculture commodity price index was indicated 67% higher than on the end of 2019 level. The favorable agricultural prices certainly have buoyed the fertiliser market as it deepens farmers’ pockets. Nutrien, the world’s largest plant nutrition producer, sees crops producers’ margin to expand by more than two hundred percent for 2021 and 2022 compared to the 2019 level.

We see the outlook for agricultural commodities to remain bright as the tight market is yet to see relief. Global grains stocks-to-use ratio that indicate the carryover availability to fulfill the full-year demand has been in a free-fall in the last couple of years. The weak prices of 2012-2020 might had disincentivized investments in this space and resulted in a weak production capacity to timely respond to demand.

The combination of economic reopening and stimulus packages during the pandemic is also providing strong support for the demand for agricultural commodities.

Provided by these circumstances, farmers should be well-incentivised to continue applying fertilizers for maintaining or boosting their production. Especially, when they know that in some parts of the world crop yield might be adversely impacted by La Nina.

It is amazing to see this rock-solid demand could afford multiple setbacks on the supply side.

The supply-side problems have dislocated ammonia market by at least 48%

Normally, ammonia plants are built altogether with the downstream fertiliser plants. The statistics of the International Fertilizers Associations (IFA) indicated only 18.4 mn tons of 185.3 mn tons global capacity production in ammonia was traded globally in 2020. Only 10% of global production was intended for trade, causing the merchant ammonia market prone to disruptions.

Based on our estimate, the current ammonia market’s equilibrium faced a dislocation of at least 48% from the 2020 locus due to the following supply-side issues:

• Energy-crisis sent one-third of European ammonia plants to shutdown

Ammonia production process requires hydrogen and involved an energy-intense process. Most of the ammonia plants today are using natural gas as their feedstock for their hydrogen rather than coal or water due to environmental and economical considerations. Natural gas as a feedstock could govern 70-90% of the cash production cost of ammonia, excluding energy cost.

According to Bloomberg Intelligence, currently, about one-third of Europe’s ammonia production plants are being shut down due to the pricey natural gas cost. Such supply gap translates into additional demand to the merchant ammonia market and pinched 30% of the merchant ammonia balance.

The reasoning behind the energy crisis was a combination between structural changes and geopolitical tension:

In Q4 2021, we saw the tight energy market take the spotlight and send costs sky-high. The sector underinvestment over the last five years driven by lackluster prices, ESG scrutiny, and global-wide consolidation jolted fossil fuel prices up when it faces a robust demand from economic reopening. We had written some of these matters in our previous blog post in June 2021 (link).

In the case of natural gas, we saw its energy cost per unit has exceeded brent oil in both Europe (Dutch TTF) and Asia (JKM). Indicating the two regions’ competition to secure supply. This was primarily due to the region’s structural shift of adopting natural gas in their path of decarbonization. This structural shift is expected to result in a shortage of LNG in the future according to McKinsey.

With over 20% gas share in their energy mix, gas demand was amplified because intermittent renewable energy did not work during winter. About 10% to 20% of energy sources had to be switched to ‘dirtier’ hydrocarbon and gas has been the top preference.

This condition is worsened as Russia’s gas flows which account for 40% of Europe’s gas supply are reduced significantly. Russia’s gas flow in December 2021 was 10.3 bcm, about 26% lower than the same period last year.

The recently escalated tension of Russia-Ukraine has resulted in the postponement of the Nordstream II pipeline operation, carving out a significant potential gas supply for the region.

The Dutch TTF’s futures are now trading above USD 20 per MMBTU until mid-2023. This price has priced in the delay of the potential gas supply and implies LNG in Europe won’t be adequate to fill in the gas stock-up in the region for the whole year which starts at a very low base as inventory level is lower than five-year lows.

Warmer winter from La Nina for Europe could help to ease the replenishment of gas production but at this rate, this effect would be rather blunt. With natural gas availability remaining uncertain, we believe that the shutdown of European ammonia producers would take some time and the country will be a dominant buyer in the market.

• Missing fertiliser exports from Russia and China

In attempts to control food prices and security domestically, Russia and China have imposed restrictions on fertilisers export to ensure the availability and affordability for local farmers until 1H22. We estimated this resulted in 18% of missing supply from the merchant ammonia market.

The uncertainty looms whether as the policy would be carried as the initial plan since the tight market in agriculture, potash, nitrogen (ammonia), and phosphate market persist. Not to mention the escalating tension between Ukraine and Russia lingering the uncertainty in the already tight agricultural and energy market.

• Supply chain constraints kept prices high

The supply chain problems constraint that was initiated from the COVID-19 pandemic still haunt the economy. The steep freight cost has reportedly caused some producers to switch their inventory policy from just-in-time to just-in-case, stretching up the freight capacity even more.

For Europe and Asia, the steep freight market capped the potential cost savings from importing through LNG freight. Based on the normal calculation, we estimated about half the price of the current LNG price in Europe and Asia is going to the freight.

In addition to supply chain issues, health protocols also delayed the recovery and development of plants. Those factors combined slows down the plant turnaround process from 20 days to 60 days, according to one of our sources in the industry. Another case in point is the development of the Ma’Aden Ammonia-3 plant’s commercialization has been stalled from December 2021 and is expected to be delayed until Q3 2022, a nine-month delay.

Ammonia could be a good long-exposures on today’s world problem

In short, tight agricultural market, energy crisis, geopolitical tension, and supply chain issues are factors that keep ammonia prices high. At the current goldilocks situation, we see European fertiliser companies purchase to set the support price for ammonia as they become the dominant buyer in the market. It still unclear on how long this confluence of problems could be untangled.

So far, the pockets of farmers have been deep enough to pay the high price of ammonia from the tailwind of their commodities. Given the tight relationship of ammonia in the multiple problematic verticals of today’s economy, perhaps ammonia exposure could be a prospective long-exposure towards todays’ world problems?

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