By John Richardson GILLIAN Tett, the outstanding financial journalist, talked about “silo thinking” in her book – Fool’s Gold – that detailed the root causes of the Global Financial Crisis. By this she meant how too many people only had deep knowledge of one particular aspect of how financial markets were supposed to work – […]
Asian Chemical Connections
Too Good To Last for Asian Petchems? Yes
By John Richardson IT has been a fantastic few months for the integrated Asian polyethylene (PE) producers as the above chart illustrates. You can see that the average price for naphtha was $533/tonne CFR Japan in April. This compared with an average high-density PE (HDPE) price of $1,271/tonne CFR Northeast Asia and an average low-density […]
Quantitative Easing Just Doesn’t Work
By John Richardson AT long last! Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank (ECB), said in a speech to the IMF last week: We have to be mindful that too prolonged a period of very low real rates can have undesirable consequences in the context of ageing societies, where many households save not just […]
More Evidence That US Shale Oil Is The New “Swing Producer”
By John Richardson SICK today with a bad cold – hence this very short post. Will, hopefully, be back in full action, though, later today or tomorow Meanwhile, here is some more background reading, which underlines myy argument that shale oil has become the new “swing producer”. It is also all good see the constant […]
Shallow Discussions Versus Complex Oil Price, Economic Realities
By John Richardson IT has been a very good year so far for European and Asian naphtha cracker operators, as the chart above illustrates. As you can see, in the case of high-density polyethylene (HDPE), naphtha-based integrated margins in 2015 are turning out to be a better so far this year than those in 2013 […]
Your Seven-Point Guide To H2 2015 Oil Prices
By John Richardson BEFORE you get carried away with the wholly misguided notion that we have entered into a “new normal” of oil prices in the region of $60-80 a barrel for the rest of this year, see below for a further and updated guide to why this kind of thinking is very, very dangerous. […]
US Fed Reinvents 19th Century Boom And Boost Oil Markets
By John Richardson ONE way of looking at the world is that central bankers know exactly what they are doing as they are Masters of the Universe. These bankers have excellent degrees and doctorates from top universities bursting out their CVs, along with fantastic track records of rescuing the global economy, I have often been […]
Why The New Belief In Oil-Price Stability Is Wrong
By John Richardson THE new consensus view on oil prices, based on my discussions with many delegate on the side lines of this year’s Asia Petrochemical Industry Conference (APIC) in Seoul, South Korea, seems to run roughly as follows: OK, most of us completely missed the H2 2014 collapse of crude, but never mind, we now […]
Oil Price Rally Built On Very Fragile Ground
By John Richardson OIL prices rallied yesterday on an unexpected fall in inventories at Cushing in the US to 61.7 million barrels for the week ending 24 April (see the above chart). This was a decline of 514,000 barrels over the previous week, which compared with forecasts of an increase of 400,000 barrels. So does […]
The Chemicals “Recovery”: Seeing Through The Flawed Logic
By John Richardson AROUND 90% or more of the price movements in most chemicals and polymers are tied to crude oil. Add to that the pick-ups in buying than can occur from time to time, based on supply and demand factors specific to particular chemicals markets, and you end up with a devilishly difficult job […]
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