“Here’s your entire allocation for this month” Source of Picture: Adammakwright.wordpress In the words of a plastics converter from the Philippines: “Markets are so tight at the moment that we are left to pick up the crumbs. Suppliers are concentrating almost entirely on China.” The converters have been waiting for so long for the great […]
Asian Chemical Connections
Credit Expansion Linked To Dalian Boom?
Source of Picture: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/ We have just started doing our research and so more details later – but see attached this Excel spreadsheet – lendingVDalianOI.xls It compares the increase in lending from China’s banks with the amount of open interest in the Dalian Commodity Exchange’s linear-low density polyethylene (LLDPE) futures contracts. Volume traded on the […]
Micro-management gone too far?
micro-management, human resources, APIC, commodity chemicals, CEOs, credit control, financial meltdown
How to make money in a downturn Part 1
John Cusack, Kate Beckinsale, antidumping petitions, trade protection, living in cloud cuckoo land
A drowning man will clutch onto anything
Peak Oil, Deutsche Bank, gas pricing, coal-o-chemicals, coal gasification, PetroRabigh, Saudi Aramco, Sumitomo Chemical
What’s it like to be a millionaire?
food poverty, Peak Oil, Asian Development Bank, World Bank, MMSA
Here we go again – 1997 is back…..
I sincerely hope not, but all the signs are there because of: *A financial crisis which nobody again saw coming, this time with global implications *What could prove to be too much spending on new equipment and capacity. This time high equity prices have paid for these investments rather than US dollar-denominated bank loans, as […]
Asian biofuels face a big crisis
After all the optimism, all the hype and a lot of investors’ money, the industry has shot itself in the foot by failing to build demand ahead of supply. Plus the negativity caused by food versus fuel and environmental counter-arguments to supporting this current generation of technologies is making some Asian governments hesitate on providing […]