This is Budget week, when the blog prepares to present its Budget Outlook for 2014-16. On Saturday, it reviewed its 2012 forecast. And starting tomorrow, it will analyse auto markets – as these are the largest single driver of demand – before issuing its 2014 Outlook next Saturday. The chart above presents the dilemma facing companies, […]
Chemicals and the Economy
2014 Budgets need to abandon hopes of Supercycle return
Next week the blog will publish its 6th annual Budget Outlook, covering the 2014-2016 period. The aim has always been to challenge conventional wisdom when this seems likely to encourage companies to take a wrong turn: • The blog’s 2007 Outlook ‘Budgeting for a Downturn‘, and its 2008 ‘Budgeting for Survival’, meant it was one of […]
Shell, Bayer, Tullow to speak at World Aromatics conference
Next month’s World Aromatics and Derivatives Conference in Brussels has a range of top-name speakers discussing key issues for the markets. Co-organised as always with ICIS, it features: Shell: Global strategy manager Herbert Le Lorrain will present Shell’s new scenarios for the future, ‘Mountains and Oceans’ Bayer MaterialScience: New procurement head Christian Buhse will provide his first impressions […]
High-frequency trading continues to take markets higher
The blog was very pleased to see the Nobel Prize awarded jointly to Robert Shiller, whose words of wisdom on housing and stock markets it has cited many times. Shiller’s key insight, in his book Irrational Expectations and since, has been to confirm Ben Graham’s famous saying: “In the short term, the market is a […]
The end of constant economic growth
You can’t turn 55-year-olds back into 30-year-olds. That, in a nutshell, is why today’s globally ageing populations are creating major changes in demand patterns. Household consumption is more than 60% of GDP in all developed countries, and also the key driver for future growth in emerging economies. So the rise of the New Old 55+ […]
Recovery has been delayed, again
Recovery has been delayed, again. That is the clear message from the blog’s extensive discussions with key executives in global and regional markets over the past 2 weeks. In summary as this ICIS video interview suggests, the picture is as follows: Base chemical demand has broadly fallen from peak levels in Q3 Most chemical buyers built inventory in […]
The eurozone debt crisis is no nearer solution
The Eurozone crisis has been quiet since the summer of 2012, as the markets waited for the German election. But now this has occurred, it is unlikely that the problem can continue to be ignored. It is easy to forget the drama of May 2012, when the blog correctly forecast a crisis was about to occur in […]
“We really see retirement as the next big financial crisis”
How much money will you actually get when you retire? And how secure will that income be? Slowly but surely a debate is starting to open up about the impact of ageing populations on economic growth. And as a result, a second and equally important debate is starting about what is actually happening to pensions. “We […]
Turkey an export battleground for PVC as China slows
Turkey has always been one of the blog’s favourite markets, when it wants to understand what is happening to supply/demand balances. The reason is that Turkey has a very successful downstream industry, but has failed to invest in upstream capacity. This means it is essentially an opportunistic market from a sellers’ viewpoint. During good times, exporters […]
Women now have half the number of children compared to 1950
Demographics drive demand. Developments since 1950 are thus creating massive and unprecedented change in global demand patterns, as the chart above highlights: Fertility rates (green) have halved on a global basis, with the average woman having just 2.5 children today Life expectancy (red) has increased by 50% over the same period, to average around 70 years […]
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