Coking crash goes full circle

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Coking coal has done almost the full round trip now as today it has fell right back to $160 per tonne:

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No spot trades, but the spot index falls anyway Plummeting headline spot prices would suggest a violent oversupply of coking coal despite QLD production still in recovery from the Cyclone outage. But in reality, the fall in the indexes seems to reflect a lack of liquidity. Buyers are not bidding, watching to see where the indexes land, and Australian producers are busy clearing ship queues and meeting contracts and have no tonnage available for spot. We note IHS commentary that producers and consumers have expressed concern about the lack of depth in the coking coal markets. They consider the “volatility in spot prices over the last 6-8 weeks, despite the absence of actual trades, is not defendable and has led them to question the methodology behind the leading indices.”- (Inside Coal) The Goonyella system in QLD remains operating at only around 65% of normal capacity and IHS assesses the local export losses from QLD so far at 13.7Mt. The price benchmarks were falling despite no physical spot activity and market participants unwilling to provide any price assessments. Last week there was minor liquidity, but only in China, with some traders offering coking coal at around $170/t. These offers seem to be from traders who have long term off-take agreements with suppliers. We won’t achieve a true spot assessment until buyers return to restock and producers have cleared backlogs.

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About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.