Source of Picture : purchasing.com In his own words, here is how one contact describes the current situation with a couple of extra points added by yours truly (with links) “We’ve seen arbitrage close from Europe on polyolefins with no new business since April-May. Some material was delivered in June but this was merely May […]
Asian Chemical Connections
Dalian LLDPE futures explained?
My last blog entry quoted a North American industry source who was concerned over the potential for physical delivery on the Dalian futures exchange to flood the real market and send prices crashing. In my ignorance of how futures markets works, and as a typicaql semi-numerate journalist, I therefore asked a colleague with a futures/mathematical […]
Futures, Recycling Behind China PE Mystery?
Picture: The China Daily “I’ve given up trying to read the polyolefin market in China. I just can’t figure out what’s going on,” said a senior source with a major North American producer late last week. “I keep returning to the fundamentals and cannot understand why prices have risen so steeply since mid-February.” Him and […]
Artificial price support about to disappear
Source of picture: gilesbowkett.blogspot.com The excellent daily energy and shipping report, The Schork Report said today that the bottom had “fallen out of the entire (energy) complex.” With the Bulls on the defensive, the authors believe that crude could retreat towards $60/bbl. Natural gas markets are so oversupplied that prices in the region of $2/mBTU […]
Where is the real demand recovery?
Have you ever been away on holiday and have cut yourself off from from work, only to return and find that nothing has changed? So it seems in polyolefin markets. As this blog has been writing about for several months, the recovery in pricing seems to have been mainly feedstock-driven as this article from ICIS […]
Back to the Serious Stuff: Fitch issues China warning
As I’ve been warning on this blog for some time, the explosion of credit in China has created a great deal of paper-bottomed optimism over the recovery. Fitch, the ratings agency, has just raised its macro-prudential risk indicator ffor China from category 1 (safe) to category 3 (Iceland et al) because of the lending surge […]
Does anyone have a clue?
Cartoon: Peter Brookes, The Times Yes, this blog has gone staggeringly quiet over the last few weeks as I gained a life: I went home to the UK and mixed with some people who had no interest in or desire to know anything about polypropylene. Do you realise that there are some people out there […]
China borrowing from the future?
It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement over the rebound in the Chinese economy and miss underlying weaknesses which point to some major problems ahead. To some extent, in a desperate effort to compensate for collapsing export trade, China might have borrowed from the future in order to achieve a swift recovery. “The […]
It’s about scaling down rather than up
One of the new skills being learnt in this current crisis is how to run plants efficiently at low operating rates. “It’s funny that for years now, we’ve worried about how to scale up profitably. Now industry is faced with just the opposite, how to scale down profitably,” says Mark Matzopoulos, chief operating officer at […]
How long can bear-market rallies last?
The current run-up in equities might go on and on – perhaps even for several years, according to economist Russell Napier. But he warns, in this excellent video interview with FT journalist John Authers, that an extended boom in equities doesn’t necessarily mean the economic fundamentals are sound. For example,the stock market rally after the […]
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