By John Richardson IF you had presented this chart to your board of directors as a margins forecast at the beginning of this year, it is quite likely that you would have been laughed out of the boardroom. Nobody expected these kind of stellar results. The thing is that this has never felt right, right […]
Asian Chemical Connections
India Versus The West: The Real Costs Of Living
By John Richardson MY two recent blog posts on what it really means to be middle class in the developing world – “The Great ‘Middle Class Myth’ Further Exposed” and “Serving The Needs Of The Vulnerable Poor Majority” – have produced this very interesting response from one of my contacts: I agree that using one […]
Why China’s Stock Market Crisis Is Great News For Economic Reforms
By John Richardson MOST people view the renewed collapse in China’s stock markets as bad news because of what it says about the country’s overall economy. In the short term this is right as the fresh decline in equities serves as another reminder that there will be no easy solutions to China’s long-standing and deeply-entrenched […]
China PP Production Up 23% As Self-Sufficiency Drive Continues
By John Richardson THE above chart provides further support for the argument I have been making for the last three years – that China’s future growth in petrochemicals capacity, and how this new capacity will operate, is not just about Western notions of economics. There is an awful lot more to this story than people […]
The Fall In Apple”s Share Price And China’s “Middle Classes”
By John Richardson SOMETHIING very important happened last week when investors wiped $30 billion off the value of Apple’s shares in the space of just one day, even though it had just delivered another excellent set of quarterly results. According to the Financial Times, the reason for the slump in the value of Apple, however […]
China And Commodities Prices: The Slow-Motion Train-Wreck
By John Richardson OIL prices are now in bear-market territory with commodities prices in general at a 13-year low, according to the latest Bloomberg Commodities index which follows 22 different commodities. Not surprisingly, therefore, the share prices of mining and other commodity-producing companies have fallen to their lowest levels since the depths of the 2008 […]
Serving The Needs Of The Vulnerable Poor Majority
By John Richardson HERE is another way of looking at the important new Pew Research study, which I first wrote about last Friday: Just 16% of the world’s population live on incomes that would take them safely above the poverty line in the US in 2011 – the latest year for which all the global […]
China’s Economic Realities In Four Charts
I’ll be again posting less frequently this week – today, obviously, Wednesday and also on Friday – as I am on still on leave. The blog returns to normal from the week starting 27 July. By John Richardson SOME graphs are worth many thousands of words, and so here are four graphs to start […]
The Great “Middle Class Myth” Further Exposed
By John Richardson A GOOD argument is only a good argument if it is backed up by sound data. Agreed? Yes, nobody is going to disagree on this point. And yet for many years now, I’ve been scratching my head with bafflement every time a senior chemicals company executive has talked in a very one-dimensional […]
China and Iran Reshape Oil Market Thinking
By John Richardson ON Monday, I discussed how a generation of analysts have grown up never having experienced a prolonged period of weak economic growth in China. Because these analysts were unable to imagine a sustained downturn in China, they bent their theories to fit a set of facts that have consistently pointed to more […]