By John Richardson AT the high inflation point of any financial bubble, you tend to get outlandishly dangerous and dodgy practices designed to make even more money because most people think that “this time will be different” – i.e. that the drunken party will go on forever. The US sub-prime disaster is, of course, a […]
Asian Chemical Connections
The US Patient Needs An Operation
By John Richardson THE Fed’s quantitative easing (QE) programme hasn’t worked because, to use an analogy, it has been equivalent to pumping drugs into a patient that needs major surgery in order to fully recover. A steady flow of drugs creates the illusion that the patient is fine, but once the drug supply is reduced […]
China: Sweat The Lending Data
By John Richardson AS business slowly gets back to normal following the Lunar New Year, everyone will be scrabbling around for indications about whether the January downturn in China was just a short-term blip, or something more significant. Confidence that things are back to normal might be taken from this Forbes article, which quotes […]
Global Equities, China, The Fed And Some Perspective
By John Richardson AS USUAL, everyone will take what they want and need to take, in order to protect their own interests, out of Monday – the worst day for the Dow Jones Industrial Average in seven months. This was followed by severe declines in several emerging market indices. Like everyone else in the somewhat […]
ExxonMobil, Energy Efficiency And Innovation
By John Richardson SAVING money through energy efficiency, along with innovation, will be two of the keys to success in the New Normal because demand-growth patterns will be very different than during the Supercycle. The suspension, which guaranteed success for everybody, has gone. We are therefore going to see some creative destruction amongst chemicals and […]
US Housing: The Demand Conundrum
By John Richardson WEALTHY people don’t buy most of the world’s chemicals and polymers production because there are not that many wealthy people in the world – especially in the US these days. The Economist, in it’s the World In 2014 magazine, writes of the US economy: “Much of the growth in GDP has gone […]
The Minority Isn’t Always Wrong
By John Richardson “I REALLY worry about the ability to export extra capacity from the US as I think global markets will become much more regional,” said a source with a poylolefins producer . “The US is also pretty much a saturated market because of high existing levels of polymers consumption [see the above graph] […]
No “Breakthrough Year” For The US In 2014
By John Richardson PEOPLE who trade in oil, other commodities and equities don’t buy that many chemicals and polymers because, of course, relative to the US population as a whole, they number very few. Thus, the challenge for 2014, as President Obama talks about a “breakthrough year” for the US economy, is spreading the strength […]
Western Demand Still Weaker
By John Richardson AS the euphoria over the Fed’s measured tapering echoes through global equity markets, many people at certain points on the continuum – which we described in detail earlier this week – will be happy. Perhaps for the next few quarters, stock markets will remain buoyant because of the measured tapering of bonds purchases and the prospect […]
Global Growth Outlook: Sorting Out The Continuum
By John Richardson WHAT do you do for a living? Are you a speculator in equity markets or do you make things for a living? These, we think, are highly relevant questions as we head towards the New Year. It is a continuum, though, in the sense of this definition of the word: A continuous sequence […]
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