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Chemicals and the Economy

Yellen offers hostage to fortune on US growth

Previous chairs of the US Federal Reserve had a poor record when it came to forecasting key events: Alan Greenspan, at the peak of the subprime housing bubble in 2005, published a detailed analysis that emphasised how house prices had never declined on a national basis Ben Bernanke, at the start of the financial crisis […]

Shiller warning suggests S&P 500 bubble coming to an end

Nobel Prizewinner Prof Robert Shiller correctly forecast the dot-com collapse in 2000, and the 2008 financial Crisis, using the chart above.  Now he is warning we risk a 3rd collapse. The problem is that Western central banks have undertaken the largest financial experiment in history.  Their policy has been to boost financial markets, particularly the US S&P 500 – the world’s […]

US Fed policy may be going Back to the Future

Today’s 419 point fall on the Dow Jones Average, and $6/bbl fall in WTI crude oil prices, may not be just another example of the wild volatility that has come to seem normal in financial markets. It may also mark the end of an era. Since 1994, the US Federal Reserve has used all its […]

Germany attacks central bank policy

During the growth years, it became fashionable for politicians to claim that central banks were “independent”. But as the current crisis has grown, this has been increasingly exposed as a myth. As the blog noted back in September 2007, Alan Greenspan (former US Federal Reserve Chairman), revealed that ‘the presumption that we were fully independent […]

Regulators discover gambling in casinos

Last week, the blog didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when Alan Greenspan told Congress that he was “in a state of shocked disbelief” to find that that his self-regulation policy for banks had failed. Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times was similarly surprised to discover the former Chairman of the US Federal […]

The global stock market decline

Alan Greenspan’s comments (below), led the blog to investigate how the world’s major stock markets had moved since their recent peaks. All, as shown in the chart, are now in bear markets. Stock markets often forecast economic developments 6 – 12 months ahead, and so this represents a negative indicator for future chemical demand. Also […]

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