The impact of Sino–US trade war on price discovery of soybean: A double‐edged sword?

Abstract

AbstractIn 2018, the world witnessed a full‐fledged trade war between United States and China with both countries levying successive tariffs on each other. Though the impact of trade war could be visibly assessed from declining export volume and rising bankruptcy filing from farmers, what went unnoticed was a far‐reaching negative impact at a granular market microstructure level. In this study, the effect of trade war on the leading role of US soybean futures in price discovery has been evaluated. The results corroborate the negative impact of trade war on the information leadership share of US soybean futures market. Moreover, the results shows that the negative impact gets manifested through various sentiment indicators such as Google search trends, hedger's sentiment, and so on. Hence, trade war may have given some temporary economic and strategic benefit to the United States, but it is no less than the proverbial double‐edged sword as it nearly killed the soybean market of the United States.