There must be lots of ways to become big in China these days, at least if you want to be "big" in the way of celebrity and reputation. Though I wouldn't recommend the path chosen by America's latest anointed "maverick trader", Richard Arens.
Now I have to qualify this blog by saying that I don't know any better than anyone else, besides presumably a handful of folks at the New York Mercantile Exchange and Mr Arens himself, if he was in fact the person who executed the first -- and for while the only -- ever trade of a WTI crude oil futures contract at $100/barrel.
But it has been widely reported around the western media that Aren was the dealer who executed the famous $100 trade that finally ended the faintly tedious "will it, won't it" saga of whether crude oil futures would break into triple digits.
These reports are starting to get noticed out here in Asia. And, wouldn't you know it, Asian pundits are very ready to blame the actions of a lone American trader for the latest surge in oil futures. We have a love/hate relationship with "rogue traders" here in Asia.
We haven't had one for a little while now in the oil markets (the last one, a Japanese trader here in Singapore, was a good year ago now), and the arrival on the scene of an American "maverick" is good enough, it seems, to get the old tongues wagging.
Singapore's own Straits Times picked up on and reproduced one report containing the rhetorical question, from one analyst, "you begin to question the validity of prices and to ask, 'are these markets really working'".
Beijing's policy-makers, steering the phenomenal growth of China's juggernaut economy that has of course had more to do with $100 oil than anything Mr Arens could have whipped together behind his keyboard and computer screen, have been asking that question for years.
Frankly the last thing Asia needs is another reason not to look closely again at the complex price subsidies, import tariffs and export policies that have combined to pay for the amazing surge in oil prices since 2003.
As a rule of thumb, Asian demand growth accounts for one third of the annual oil demand growth that is underpinning the demand story behind high oil prices. The US and the Middle East account for a third each of the remaining demand growth, in general.
For now, at least, there is hardly any sign that the Asian demand story will change this year. And the countries east of the Suez that still run price subsidies show no sign of ditching them. In fact, the higher the price of oil goes, the less inclined countries like China and India are to ditch those subsidies, fearing a social backlash that looks all the more terrifying to politicians with every $1 tick higher in crude prices.
But as policy-makers here sit down ahead of Chinese New Year, the next hallmark moment in the Asian calendar that comes in early February, you have to hope against hope that the likes Mr Aren don't figure much in the conversation.
It took one trade to make $100 oil a reality. But by my count of the settlement data from NYMEX, it took more than 60 million trades over the whole of 2007 and the start of 2008 for oil to get to $99.
That debate will carry one, for sure. In the meantime, I doubt Mr Arens will find a free pass to the Olympics waiting for him if he ever shows up in Beijing this year.
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