Cotton markets are poised for another testing month in April. The outcome will also have potentially major implications for the polyester chain – and in turn for commodities markets more generally. The reason is that China has announced that its long-awaited cotton auction will take place in the second half of the month. Cotton stocks […]
Chemicals and the Economy
Xi in Paris: all part of China’s New Normal
President Xi’s presence at the Climate Change conference highlights the far-reaching changes set out in China’s new 5 Year Plan, as I describe in my latest post for the Financial Times, published on the BeyondBrics blog How times change. President Xi Jinping has just become the first Chinese president to attend a climate change conference. His presence in Paris […]
Oil price rally disappears along with hopes of more stimulus
Many people in financial markets were hoping a new QE4 stimulus programme would be announced at the recent IMF meeting in Peru. Unsurprisingly, markets rallied in anticipation: Brent oil was at $44/bbl on 24 August, and rallied to $56/bbl within a week The US S&P 500 Index rallied from 1823 to 1979 over the same period […]
China focuses on mobile internet for domestic growth
China’s President Xi went to Seattle at the start of his recent US visit, to meet the leading US internet companies. It was the clearest possible signal of his priorities for the future of China’s economy under his New Normal policies. He spent half a day on the Microsoft campus, and had a private dinner […]
China’s PP production rises 25% as it moves into higher-value export markets
Everyone is now beginning to notice the change in economic policy in China. And concern is rising about the outlook for all those new petchem investments about to come online, whose rationale has been the need to supply ever-increasing growth in Chinese demand. The chart above highlights the reality behind this wishful thinking: Everyone “knew” […]
China’s economy continues to slow as lending curbs bite
Everyone seems sure that China’s government is about to undertake major new stimulus. Thus Reuters reported: “Economists said it was a matter of when, not if, China eased policy again after economic growth in Q1 cooled to 7%, a level not seen since the depths of the 2008/09 global financial crisis. Indeed, some analysts have […]
President Xi says more to China’s economy than its growth rate
China’s economy has not had a good start to the year. Central bank governor, Zhou Xiaochuan, admitted at the weekend that growth had “tumbled a bit too much“, adding: “China’s inflation is also declining, so we need to be vigilant to see if the disinflation trend will continue, and if deflation will happen or not” […]
China exports deflation to the West
Unfortunately, the European Central Bank (ECB) does not read the blog, or yet subscribe to ‘The pH Report’. If it did, it would have been forewarned back in August that a collapse in oil prices was potentially about to provide the catalyst for the arrival of deflation. Instead, as the Minutes of its critical January […]
BRIJ auto sales head in different directions
There has been a lot of wishful thinking over the past 15 years about the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China). The experts told us they were all going to become middle class overnight, and ensure that global growth continued to motor, even as the West slowed. Reality has proved rather different, of course. This makes […]
How to survive the Great Unwinding of policymaker stimulus
I was privileged to be interviewed by Merryn Somerset Webb, editor-in-chief of MoneyWeek (the UK’s best-selling financial magazine) in this week’s edition. The interview covered a wide range of topics including the perilous state of UK house prices and some stock markets, and has prompted enormous interest amongst MoneyWeek readers. Merryn is one of the UK’s leading […]
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