By John Richardson YOU cannot turn 65-year-olds into 35-year-olds, no matter how much central bank stimulus you throw at the problem. This is why the real, underlying problem with Japan is its demographics which make all the current attempts to stimulate its way to stronger local growth pretty much futile. If there are not enough […]
Asian Chemical Connections
Jokes Don’t Keep You Healthy
By John Richardson “I FEEL like I’m living in clouds of smog,” Zheng Qiaoyun, a Shanghai resident who kept her 6-month-old son at home told the UK’s Guardian newspaper. “I have a headache, I’m coughing, and it’s hard to breathe on my way to my office.” The reason was another pollution scare in China, this […]
Rest In Peace, Nelson Mandela
By John Richardson He got it, he understood it and in a fractious, self-interested world his self-sacrifice for his nation, his forgiveness for people who were once his enemies, was amazing after 27 years in prison. If many of the rest of us were wrongfully imprisoned for one day, we might well struggle to forgive […]
Chemicals Companies Risk Losing Market Muscle
By John Richardson IT used to be so easy. All you had to do was build a feedstock-advantage plant outside China and/or build a plant in China and demand would take care of itself. The reason was that China was on a roll from 2001 onwards thanks to its accession to the World Trade Organisation, […]
Credit Tightening The Key For China In 2014
By John Richardson WE have been on a magical mystery tour during the second of half 2013 in an effort to discover what has really driven the 14% year-on-year increase in polyethylene (PE) apparent demand in China in January-August – the latest data that is available to us. Apparent demand is imports plus domestic production. […]
The Trickle-Down Effect….Again
By John Richardson THE classic image of the high-school student flipping Big Macs has become out of date in the US, according to this New York Times article. “Because of lingering unemployment and a relative abundance of fast-food jobs, older workers are increasingly entering the industry ,” adds the NYT. “These days, according to the […]
German Politicians Head In The Wrong Direction
By John Richardson IT took Germany’s politicians five weeks, including a final marathon 17-hour negotiating session, to agree on a “grand coalition”, points out The Economist in this article. The trouble is that, despite this massive expenditure of hot air the deal to form a government, led by Chancellor Angela Merkel (see left), appears likely […]
Less Rather Than More Petchems Free Trade
By John Richardson A LOT of the talk at this year’s GPCA conference in Dubai was of the need for more free trade in petrochemicals. There seems to be a risk that as more countries develop refinery and petrochemicals businesses, free trade will decline rather than increase. Creating and protecting jobs will, surely, be a […]
The Iran-West Nuclear Deal: An Update
By John Richardson MANY thanks to a good friend of the blog, Mark Mark Mirosevic-Sorgo, managing director of the Singapore-headquartered shipbrokers Braemar Quincannon for what follows – some excellent analysis of what the Iran-West nuclear deal might mean for the petrochemicals business, which follows on from our earlier post. Here are Mark’s comments: It has […]
Iran-West Nuclear Deal Could Boost Naphtha Cracking
By John Richardson THE blog has met many Iranian delegates during its seven years of working for ICIS Training and visited the country a couple of times during the early 2,000s. We love the people and the country, but not some of the politics on both sides. And so it was great news to hear […]
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