TPT May 2010

lobal

arketplace

2010

www.read-tpt.com

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Unquestionably Russia holds the best hand in the continental energy

stakes, and will for some time to come. But the proliferation of interested

parties, both as contractual purchasers of Russian oil and partners in

transport systems, increases the number of influences on Moscow.

If, as seems probable, Ukraine continues to be a thorn in its side,

Russia now must consider other factors (eg the extension to 2037 of the

contract under which Gazprom will supply gas to Poland’s PGNiG gas

monopoly, to an expanded maximum of 359 bcf a year) before weighing

interruption of the flow of fuel westward.

Money matters

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The rise in the number of Indian billionaires – to 49 last year, up

from 24 in 2008 – on

Forbes

magazine’s latest “rich list” reflects the

growing prosperity of India and the entrepreneurial skills of its nationals.

One of the billionaires, Mukesh Ambani, whose petrochemicals fortune

makes him the richest person in the Asia-Pacific region, ranks fourth

among wealthy individuals worldwide, behind only Carlos Slim Helu (of

Mexico) and the Americans Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Mr Ambani’s

fellow-Indian Lakshmi Mittal, the steel magnate, came fifth.

The Indian showing on

Forbes

’s “World’s Billionaires” is the more

remarkable vis-à-vis the Chinese. While China can boast more

billionaires than India (and every other country besides the US), the

Indian billionaires have more billions. According again to

Forbes

, in

a local edition from November 2009, the wealthiest 100 Indians are

collectively worth $276 billion. Their Chinese counterparts in the Top

100 are worth $170 billion.

Trade

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China on 10 March announced that its exports climbed 46% in

February from a year earlier, marking the third consecutive month

of increases and the fastest export growth in three years. Economists

attributed the results to a rebound in consumer demand from the US,

the European Union, and Japan, which together accounted for almost

half the growth after a two-month period of higher demand for Chinese

wares from emerging markets.

Signalling a revival in trade after the financial crisis last year, the pickup

in Chinese exports could move Beijing closer to letting its currency, the

renminbi, appreciate against the US dollar. While China’s prime minister,

Wen Jiabao, still publicly rejects the contention of Western governments

that the yoking of the two currencies keeps Chinese exports artificially

cheap and therefore hyper-competitive, a close China-watcher might

have picked up an early hint of a shift. On 6 March, the governor of the

central People’s Bank of China, Zhou Xiaochuan, said that pegging the

renminbi to the US dollar was a “special foreign exchange mechanism”

that would be abandoned “sooner or later.”

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Last time in this space, China’s edging-out of Germany as the

world’s No. 1 exporter was termed “largely symbolic” – and so

it is. According to the European Union’s statistics office Eurostat,

the German trade surplus reached $184.9 billion in 2009, by far the

largest in Europe. Germany’s surplus was more than triple that of the

Netherlands, in second place.

But Germany does not relinquish first-place positions gladly, even when

the displacement is both inevitable and years in the making. As early