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Chemicals and the Economy

Markets wait for oil price lead

The March IeC Boom/Gloom Index confirms the blog’s sense that markets are sitting on a fence, waiting for something to happen. As the chart shows (blue column), it has risen back to 4.1, just at the point which divides strong from weak markets. Similarly the US S&P 500 Index (red line) is stuck at 1369, […]

€489bn avoids Eurozone collapse, for now

A month ago, the former UK Finance Minister, Alastair Darling, warned that the European Central Bank (ECB) had “to recognise they have to be the lenders of the last resort”. He added that “This is far worse than the banking crisis of 2008 in its seriousness and, if it is not solved by Christmas, I […]

Recession may now be very close

German Chancellor Merkel’s recent comment that “I don’t see anything which signals a recession in Germany” is just one sign of the current complacency about the global economy within the Western political elite. Long-standing readers will remember Profs Eichengreen and O’Rourke 2009-10 work comparing today’s Great Recession with the Depression of the 1930s. Worryingly, the […]

An unmanaged Greek default gets closer

The Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair may come to be seen as a critical turning point, when the story of the Greek default is written. The then IMF head was en route to meet German Chancellor Merkel, when arrested in New York last month. He had been at the forefront of the campaign to pretend that Greece […]

Wine price rises parallel those for crude oil

Many of the blog’s readers have been known to sample the occasional glass of wine. So it thought new research, from the IMF (International Monetary Fund), on the linkage between higher prices for fine wine and crude oil, might be of general interest. The IMF’s researchers wanted to analyse “the causes of extreme fluctuations in […]

IMF warns on government spending

The global economy and the chemical industry have been boosted, since the Crisis began in 2008, by massive government stimulus programmes in areas such as autos and housing. Now the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has released a new report, focusing on what happens next. It warns that “general government debt is expected to rise by […]

IMF targets bankers’ FAT

We are often told that investment bankers are much cleverer than the rest of us. But sometimes, they do seem to lack common sense. Their behaviour since the Crisis, in paying out $bns in bonuses to the lucky few, seems no way to appease understandable public anger over the cost of the banks’ bailout. The […]

World Bank sees deeper recession

The chemical industry is always a leading indicator of the global economy. One of the blog’s oldest friends used to be a central banker, and he made no secret of the fact that our discussions about demand levels were often an important factor in his overall analysis. So it is no great surprise that the […]

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