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Asian Chemical Connections

Free China Outlook Webinar On Wednesday

By John Richardson THE blog has spent the last three years focusing heavily on China’s economy. Our analysis, which predicted China’s  about turn, has now gone mainstream. And now we are running two free webinars on Wednesday (23 April), which will provide our readers with our views on where we think China is heading over the […]

What Chinese Q1 GDP Growth Really Tells Us

By John Richardson ONE of the comments the blog often hears is that even though China’s GDP growth has clearly decelerated, when measured against anywhere else in the world its growth rates are still tremendous. This argument is deeply flawed and belongs to the world of “wishful thinking”. The key, instead, is to first of […]

China Housing The Biggest Risk

By John Richardson WHEN the blog made the point during a recent presentation that China is still predominantly a poor country, a chemicals industry executive pointed out that it doesn’t feel that way if you visit the Apple store in Hong Kong. If you do, you will see lots of rich mainlanders buying every I-Phone […]

China Is “The Fragile One”

By John Richardson THE “Fragile Five” might, as we discussed on Monday, have become “The Exposed Eight” developing countries threatened by a disorderly Fed tapering. But what if, in all the focus on the Fed cutting back on quantitative easing, we have overlooked a far bigger withdrawal of central bank largesse – that which is […]

China: The Cost of Shutting Down

By John Richardson ONCE a petrochemicals plant is built it is pretty hard to shut it down. This might well apply to Europe, which is why we think talk of widespread cracker and derivatives closures to make way for highly competitive new US and Middle East capacity could be overdone. And definitely, without any shadow […]

Analyse The Data And Listen To Li Keqiang

By John Richardson IT IS important to look at long-term trends in China rather than be misled by a few positive sets of data. This is not pessimism, just realism. Yesterday saw the release of very good August export data.  Exports were up by 7.2% from year earlier, and were 5.1% higher than in July […]

Two Chinas With No Clear Outcome

By John Richardson THERE are at least two Chinas out there right now, one where rebalancing seems to be working and another where the impact of economic restructuring looks as if it might upset the whole apple cart. “I think the new government has really bitten the bullet. The more you look into it, the […]

Cheaper Credit Drives Inventory Building

  By John Richardson A DRAMATIC dip in the cost of short-term financing seems to further explain why China’s manufacturers  have ramped-up their inventories of raw materials. When raw-material prices, including those of petrochemicals, start to rise (see the example of polyethylene above), and credit is cheaper, the instinctive response is to stock-up ahead of […]

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