By John Richardson MY blog post last Friday, on the threat to the petrochemicals industry of a retreat in global free trade, has gained a great deal of interest. This is good as this is an essential debate. Today I am therefore going to take this important debate further by considering in more detail how […]
Asian Chemical Connections
Oil Prices: You Must Answer The Supercycle Argument
By John Richardson THE continuing failure of genuine price discovery in oil markets was perfectly summarised by the the Wall Street Journal today, when it wrote: Commodity hedge funds added $4.1 billion in the first quarter, their best quarter in more than six years, eVestment said Monday. That trend is still supporting oil prices now, giving […]
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, […]
Japan Repeats Its Mistake. You Cannot Print Babies
By John Richardson WHEN you have built your reputation on a policy that has so far failed, you have essentially two options. You can either admit you were wrong and reverse course or double down on your mistake – i.e. do more of the same failed thing in the hope that it will somehow eventually […]
China’s Courage And Vision In Ending One-Child Policy
By John Richardson CHINA’S decision to scrap its one-child policy will obviously not make any significant difference to labour shortages for at least the next 20 years or so as that is how long it will take all the new children to grow up and join the workforce. This is assuming there is a sudden […]
China PP Exports Jump 38% On Jobs Drive
Polyolefins markets in Asia are not behaving in the way that they used to behave. For value-added analysis of these changes, and for price and margin forecasts for the region, contact john.richardson@icis.com for details of how to subscribe to our Asian Polypropylene and Asian Polyethylene forecast reports. By John Richardson NOT everything in […]
Too Good To Last for Asian Petchems? Yes
By John Richardson IT has been a fantastic few months for the integrated Asian polyethylene (PE) producers as the above chart illustrates. You can see that the average price for naphtha was $533/tonne CFR Japan in April. This compared with an average high-density PE (HDPE) price of $1,271/tonne CFR Northeast Asia and an average low-density […]
Ageing Populations And Fitting Two Billion Into One Billion
By John Richardson THE above chart is of absolutely critical importance for anybody who is serious about estimating both the strength and nature of future global demand growth for chemicals. If you are not a serious analysts then, sure, ignore demographics and cling on to a few vacuous slogans such as the “rise of the […]
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