How China Saved the Global Oil Market | Hacker News Reader

How China Saved the Global Oil Market

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30 pointsmooreds9 comments

It seems forgotten now but for about a year before all this people were confused about why the oil price was higher than it should be as they expected a glut.

This theory would suggest that China was filling giant reserves at a certain price point.

There should be enough data to confirm or deny that by now.

Weren’t the Americans also? The Biden admin drew the reserves down during a crunch and filled them back again when there was a glut of oil. I’m guessing most countries with a reserve were doing that. Oddly enough the MAGA side saw this as shenanigans (but we’re ok when Trump did the same thing, of course).

But what does it get in return for that!!??

Freedom. We cherish freedom, and we attain it through technological progress and self-restraint—unlike certain nations that rely on plunder.

I think they give stability to the world market and therefore their own exports. With low domestic demand they wouldn’t survive high gas prices.

The fact they have the power to do this says more. The sheer size of power and control that China has is to be respected and treated as such " a global superpower" that can provider greater safety control to normalized global economies. What's profound is their use of power and leverage, the decisions made are carefully articulated and meaningful.

I heard it described as an inversion of the OPEC cartel. China can now influence prices as much as they can/could, up to a point. They prepared in Feb by buying 200M barrels, as if they had uncannily high confidence Trump was going to start a war with Iran.

China can now directly control the rate at which the world electrifies transportation and transitions to clean energy, through controlling the price of oil, which is a direct input into how rapidly countries importing clean tech from China do so. Want to stoke exports? Increase oil imports until the target crude oil price been reached. Slow them? Reduce oil imports to relax global oil prices, reducing demand for clean tech. Like a central bank using short term interest rates to govern economic run rate.

https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...

Their demand isn’t that elastic, they can lower prices but personal transport is electrifying fast, and they will eventually not have many places to use oil after their reserves are full. They only need so much for non transport uses also.

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