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Asian Chemical Connections

Central Banks Risk Being Behind The Curve

By John Richardson BACK in 2003 the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) predicted that dangerous imbalances were building up in the global financial system. The BIS, a Brussels-based international organisation for central banks, was worried that the Fed and other central banks were compromising long term stability in favour of short-term growth. Sadly, policymakers didn’t […]

US To Lose Out To China In Energy Race

By John Richardson ARE you either a “tree hugger” or a “climate science denier”? If you fall into one of these two categories, you will be one of the dwindling minority of people who support a multi-faceted approach to US energy policy, according to a US petrochemicals industry source. “The tree huggers are those who […]

China To Follow In America’s Oil And Gas Footsteps

By John Richardson DURING the economic Supercycle it all worked beautifully, as the above picture indicates. China sold stuff to the West and then bought lots of US Treasuries from their earnings in order to keep US interest rates low. This enabled US consumers to buy even more shirts, washing machines, refrigerators, TVs etc from […]

Help Us Answer Some Very Important Questions

  Sometimes two  graphs can be worth a thousand words. IF the world economy is well and truly on the right course then why is that global chemicals operating rates have yet to return to their pre-crisis levels? (see the top chart from the American Chemistry Council). This is a very long downturn by historic […]

US Shale Gas: Demand Is The Thing

By John Richardson Here is one way of looking at the shale gas industry in the US from a March Oxford Economics Report: While most of the companies that have made write-downs are not quitting, many players in this industry have already noted that the revolution is not as technically and financially attractive as they […]

What Yuan Depreciation Means

By John Richardson THE truth is that nobody has ever entirely understood the nature of China’s chemicals and polymers demand. During the good times, at the height of China’s credit Ponzi scheme, if you were a sales manager, why ask too many questions? Sales were sales and if mono-ethylene glycol (MEG) ended up stuck in […]

China: “Just When I Thought I Was Out….”

By John Richardson THE BLOG woke up this morning determined to write about something else, but, as Michael Corleone said in Godfather III, “just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in”. What stopped us writing about US propane prices and what this might mean for Chinese propane dehydrogenation-polypropylene (PP) start-ups this […]

Central Banks Chase The Inflation Illusion

By John Richardson IT was Milton Friedman who famously said “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary problem”. This widely accepted economic wisdom is based on the following premise: Excessive expansion of the money supply is inherently inflationary. And so one can still argue that all that central banks have to do is to keep […]

China: Do The Maths On 2014 GDP Growth

By John Richardson DO the maths and you should be able to assess what could happen to China’s GDP growth in 2014: The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences wrote last week in the China Daily: If the PBOC loosens monetary policy to push down borrowing rates, it will have to achieve total social financing – a broad […]

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