Coronavirus lockdown: Shanghai loses its currency trading crown to Beijing as city’s paralysis saps transactions

The fallout of China’s zero-Covid policy is starting to show in Shanghai’s financial markets, with the city losing its top currency trading hub title for the first time.

Shanghai handled fewer currency deals than Beijing in April, to rank second among China’s 36 provinces and municipalities, according to the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (Safe). The decline points to another consequence of strict lockdowns and may serve as a case study for the possible implications of movement curbs in major Chinese cities, including Beijing, as Covid-19 cases climb.

Traders volunteering to stay in the office, sleeping on trading floors, did little keep up currency volumes. Settlement and sales by banks for their clients, dropped 30 per cent from March to US$61.8 billion. That’s 15 per cent of the national tally, compared with a steady share of around 20 per cent before the lockdown, as per data going back to 2019.

The data precisely reflect that the lockdowns have had a profound impact on economic activities, said Liu Peiqian, chief China economist at NatWest Group. “Corporates’ usual hedging, buying and selling of currencies has been affected, even though financial services may have been kept running normally to a large extent,” she said.

Prolonged Covid-19 restrictions have damaged China’s economic prospects and prompted banks including UBS Group and Goldman Sachs Group to slash their growth forecasts for this year. The impact on Shanghai’s economy has been dire. Not a single car was sold in the city last month and its industrial output plunged more than 20 times faster than rest of the nation.

Despite easing curbs, Shanghai is not completely out of the woods yet. Its vice mayor said last week that the city aims to return to normal life and restore full factory production by mid-to-late June.