By John Richardson EVERYTHING started going very well for the global polyethylene (PE) business from the end of 2014/early 2015 if you look at the spreads, or differentials, between naphtha costs and PE pricing. Spreads are only a blunt instrument to measure real profits. But both spreads and integrated naphtha-based margins have reached historic highs since this turning […]
Asian Chemical Connections
Trump, China’s Geographic Realities And The Risks Ahead
By John Richardson DONALD Trump doesn’t read that many books. But one book that he should read (assuming he hasn’t done already,and so apologies in advance if I am wrong) is Tim Marshall’s excellent Prisoners of Geography. The chapter on China, for instance, argues that: China’s ‘Nine Dash Line’, which in 2013 became ten dashes […]
US Trade Policies Risk Making America’s Problems Worse
By John Richardson YOU start with studying the data. You then double check, triple check and quadruple check the data. Next, once you are satisfied with the data, you ask yourself this question: “What does the data mean?” All of us must try – and this is incredibly difficult – to keep emotion out of […]
The Trump White House: Why Facts Should Be Sacred
By John Richardson IN a 1921 essay marking the centenary of the British newspaper, the Manchester Guardian, CP Scott, the newspaper’s editor, wrote this very famous sentence: “Comment is free, but facts are sacred”. It is therefore heartening that the media has held the Trump administration accountable for comments about the size of the crowd at […]
The Failure Of The Liberal Political And Economic Elite
By John Richardson ONE of the research papers produced ahead of this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos highlighted demographics as one of the key reasons for rising working and middle class discontent in the West. In an exact echo of the arguments that Paul Hodges and I have been putting forward since […]
Xi’s Davos Speech: Risks, Opportunities For Chemicals Industry
By John Richardson CHINA’S President Xi Jinping yesterday delivered a speech to World Economic Forum in Davos that has been widely praised. What made the speech very striking was how its tone and content contrasted with just about everything US president-elect Donald Trump has said. Let’s look at just two aspects of the speech (please read […]
Trump’s Yuan Mistake And A New Global Debt Crisis
By John Richardson DONALD Trump is right when he says that China is manipulating its currency. It is just that he misunderstands the direction in which the currency is being manipulated. Ten years ago, he would have been correct to accuse China of manipulating its currency downwards. Today, though, the opposite applies as China tries to […]
Trump’s Diplomacy And Oil Prices
By John Richardson WHEN he was a candidate for the presidency of the US, Donald Trump promised to “bomb the hell” out of oilfields controlled by ISIL. He also declared: “I’m good at war in a certain way” and “I love war… including with nukes, yes, including with nukes.” What is said about policy during […]
Southeast Asia: Confronting The Real Downside Potential
By John Richardson SOUTHEAST ASIA’S (SEA) economies can be divided into two main categories. These are the heavily export-exposed economies of Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Singapore and the two countries with the biggest internal demand drivers – Indonesia and the Philippines. Next come the smaller emerging SEA economies with tremendous longer-term potential, such as Myanmar […]
Ageing Populations Threaten A Repeat Of The 1930s
By John Richardson THIS is an era of the populist strongman, and also a woman if Marine Le Pen wins this year’s French presidential election. We have been here before, of course, many times in history, most notably in the 1930s where rising discontent over the failure of mainstream politicians to meet the needs of their […]