By John Richardson IF you get it, you understand what is really happening out there, there is no guarantee that you will be successful as Machiavelli (see below right) – the great Italian Renaissance historian, politician, philosopher and writer etc. – so aptly described when he wrote: It ought to be remembered that there is […]
Asian Chemical Connections
Global Autos Sales: Preparing For A 40% Decline
By John Richardson ARE you preparing for a 40% collapse in global auto sales by 2040? Are you instead, both privately and publicly, burying your head in the sand because 2040 seems too far away to even begin to think about? But this Barclays Investment Bank scenario for a possible 40% collapse in auto sales by […]
China’s Export Strategy: The Realistic Scenario
By John Richardson THE analyst was giving me hard time. “You see, the problem is you are not a chemicals engineer, and haven’t crunched the supply and demand data and cost curve data. What you are talking about is all fuzzy and intangible and so just plain wrong”. The conversation I was having with this […]
Investors Mislead US On Oil Versus Natural Gas
By John Richardson DID you raise the right concerns during board meetings before the end of great oil-price bull run? If you didn’t, this is not intended as a criticism because it would quite likely have been career suicide to tell your CEO that something might go wrong. What’s important now, though, is not to […]
Demographics And Economics: We Haven’t Even Had The Debate
By John Richardson JAPAN has seen two decades of deflation and rising debts. Everyone should now recognise that Abenomics have failed to resolve this crisis. Abenomics were always going to fail because you cannot print babies. What a pity that Western central bank chiefs didn’t take a long hard look at Japan years ago. Instead […]
China’s Yuan: Making Sense Of All The Noise
By John Richardson LAST year nearly $1trn was moved out of China as rich people lost confidence in the direction of the economy. Much of this was moved if not illegally, then through stretching the rules to the very edge of snapping point. Take the practice of Smurfing as an example. The New York Times […]
Negative Interest Rates Will Not Work
By John Richardson WE are entering an almost surreal world where Western central bankers, rather than admit they are wrong, have either already opted for, are in the case of the Fed are openly discussing, negative lending rates. If the Fed and other central banks followed the examples of the likes of European Central Bank, […]
The Risks Ahead For Polyethylene
By John Richardson TOO many people will look at the chart on the left and think, “Crisis? What crisis?” But glance to the right for what it is like in another petrochemicals value chain. What is happening on the right could sooner than you think be happening on the left: The polyethylene (PE) value chain […]
Oil Prices: Same As 200 Apples And Googles Going Bust
By John Richardson NO less than $119 trillion (or $119,000 billion) has been wiped off the value of the world’s proven oil reserves. YES, that’s right, if you look at the data on proven oil reserves in the CIA factbook, as John Mauldin did to verify calculations originally made by David Aron Levine, this is […]
Just Look At China’s Lending Data. It Was Always That Simple
By John Richardson YOU will be in the airport bookshop in a couple of years’ time, staring at shelf after shelf of books about why everyone should have seen this latest global economic recession/crisis coming. What everyone will agree on, in fine rear-view mirror fashion, will be that China was the trigger for financial contagion. […]
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