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MOSCOW — Russia and China are poised to take a small but symbolic step in their expanding economic relationship, a move that in the long term could make the dollar less relevant to business between the two nations.
On Wednesday, a Moscow securities exchange opened direct trading between the Chinese currency, the renminbi, and the Russian ruble. If the market develops, it could eventually cut the dollar out of a portion of Russian and Chinese trade.
Although China’s business with Russia is only a sliver of what it does with the United States, there is room to grow: Russia is the world’s largest energy exporting nation, and China a big consumer as the world’s second-largest economy, behind the United States. And yet when a railroad tanker of Russian oil crosses the border into China, the transaction is settled in dollars.
The new currency exchange is meant to start changing that. The trading system will operate through the Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange, or Micex, which is Russia’s largest stock exchange and also handles foreign currency transactions. It will be the first trading in the Chinese currency outside mainland China and Hong Kong.
“We are pioneers,” a Micex spokesman, Nikita N. Bekasov, said in a telephone interview. In the long term, if other nations moved in the same direction, trading in renminbi outside China could diminish demand for the dollar. Chinese companies exporting to Russia or other countries could instead buy local currency directly, without the need for dollars as a common currency to conduct their business.
Initially, the Micex renminbi-ruble session will last one hour each morning, timed for trading with banks in Russia’s Far East near the Chinese border, many time zones ahead of Moscow.
“It has symbolic value,” said Peter Westin, the chief economist at Aton, a brokerage firm in Moscow.
The development coincides with the opening of a trans-Siberian oil pipeline that is expected to expand Russia’s trade with China by freeing up railroad capacity for exports of coal, metals or other commodities, and could make it easier to do business along the remote border.
“If China places some part, even a small part, of its reserves in rubles, this is a major boost to the global fortunes of the ruble,” Yaroslav Lissovolik, chief economist at Deutsche Bank in Moscow, said in an interview.
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