By John Richardson AN economic theory is only of any use if it actually works in practice and if it becomes obvious it doesn’t work what is the first thing you should do? Well, of course, the answer is you scrap that theory and start again. Not, sadly, in the case of the Fed who, […]
Asian Chemical Connections
The Price Of Oil: Another Huge Historical Shift
By John Richardson FIRST came the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 followed by the reunification of Germany and the integration of Eastern Europe in general into the Western way of running the world. Then came China’s rise following the Deng Xiaoping 1992 “Southern Tour” and China’s admission to the World Trade Organisation in 2001. […]
US Consumers Can No Longer Rescue The Global Economy
By John Richardson WE have gone beyond a major turning point in world history when many of the certainties we used to be able to depend on simply no longer apply. Just about everyone now accepts that the old certainties relating to China no longer apply. That’s the good news. But the bad news is […]
Another Round of Fed Stimulus Now Even More Likely
By John Richardson I am becoming more and more convinced that more of Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results – is on the way: A fourth round of Fed quantitative easing. This is the way in which I think this will happen: The […]
Fed Rate Rise And Indonesia: You Should Be “Shock Proof”
By John Richardson AS you waited for your flight, you picked up a nice glossy magazine that talked about the “Asian economic miracle” in the kind of one-dimensional language that might have got some of you into this mess in the first place. You then returned to your chemicals company to read report after report […]
Six Big Risks Of Fed Rate Hike And Some Long-Term Realism
By John Richardson IF you thought the 2013 Taper Tantrum was bad enough, I am afraid you have seen nothing yet. When the Fed finally does raise interest rates, either this year or next year, these are just six results: Whilst the perception out there is that emerging market sovereign debt is not as bad as it […]
Five Misunderstandings About Oil And Maybe A Sixth One
By John Richardson THE first misunderstanding about oil prices, which everyone now accepts was wrong, arose because people took too much notice of existing cost-per-barrel economics and so assumed that from October of last year, the US would close down huge amounts of shale-oil capacity. This didn’t happen because a.) Costs were lower than anticipated […]
Asian Ethylene Markets: What We Definitely Know
By John Richardson FORECASTING the absolute future price of any petrochemical has always been difficult and if you are ever exactly right this will be down more to good luck than good judgement. And the problem is that when you have been right once, and you make a big song and dance about it, everyone […]
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 […]
The Real US Employment Story
By John Richardson THE “Will they won’t they?” debate became even more intense on Friday following the release of the US Labor Department’s employment report for August. Whether or not the Fed will raise interest rates in September, or at least by the end of this year, seemed no clearer as the report showed that […]
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