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Chemicals and the Economy

The New Normal for global industry

The global chemical industry is the third largest sector in the world behind agriculture and energy, and its outputs find their way into everything we consume. Paul Hodges, chairman of the pH Report, analyzes the chemical industry to give a unique perspective on the global economy to investors and corporations. In this timely discussion, he […]

Chemical and oil prices still lower than 3 years ago

Its now 3 years since the blog suggested on 2 May 2011: “They don’t ring bells at market turning points.  Otherwise, we could all retire to the Bahamas.   But there is growing anecdotal evidence, from chemical buyers and the main retailers, that we may have reached at least a temporary market peak.  And Brent crude oil […]

China’s petchem volume surge will hit imports, as electricity consumption/bank lending data shows economy’s growth starting to slow

The above chart is the blog’s best effort to correlate the change in China’s bank lending with the real economy. It shows electricity consumption (blue line) and lending (red column) since July 2008. Electricity consumption is an excellent proxy for the real economy, and probably more reliable than GDP figures, which are widely believed to […]

One week later

A week ago, I wrote that it would be important to see if ‘the US Federal Reserve can pull a rabbit out of its hat’ at its meeting later that day. The dust has now settled on its 0.5% Fed Funds rate cut, and one can see that short term liquidity has certainly been improved, […]

Thursday’s child has far to go

The past two Thursdays have seen extraordinary things happen in financial markets. Last Thursday, BNP Paribas suspended redemptions on 3 of its funds, forcing the ECB to inject €95bn of liquidity into the financial system. Yesterday, the largest US mortgage lender, Countrywide Financial, had to raise an emergency €11.5bn loan in order to continue trading, […]

Rolling thunder and Penn Square Bank

When I worked with ChemConnect in the halcyon days of the dot-com era in 1999-2000, we had a fantastic PR lady called Linda Stegeman. Linda ignored conventional wisdom about ‘bundling’ all your best news together to gain maximum impact. Instead, she released the stories one by one, and let them build. First Dow and Rohm […]

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