“Forget the Crimea annexation or a U.S.-Russia standoff. The biggest international threat to U.S. economic growth is the slowdown in China, say economists polled by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).” That was last week’s headline in the WSJ. These, of course, are the same economists who have been busy telling us for years that China […]
Chemicals and the Economy
Crimea referendum highlights growing geo-political risks
Markets have been remarkably calm ahead of Crimea’s planned Sunday referendum to leave Ukraine and join Russia. Yet as Associated Press has reported: “The Group of 7 world leaders say they won’t recognize results of a referendum for the Crimea region to split from Ukraine and join Russia. A statement from the seven nations released from […]
India’s car buyers remain cautious despite pre-election tax cut
Its pre-election time in India, as the world’s largest democracy prepares to go to the polls next month. And so auto sales are receiving special attention from the politicians in advance of the vote. Thus the Finance Minister cut taxes last month on all models, to 8% from 12% for small cars, 2-wheelers and commercial vehicles; to […]
5 years of stimulus have only delayed move to the New Normal
Coincidentally the blog began its 6-monthly review of global financial market performance on 7 March 2009, as the US market hit its post-Crisis bottom. At this point, it was possible to hope that central banks would allow markets to resolve the issues that they themselves had created. After all, there would have been no subprime crash if the US Federal […]
China focuses on domestic PE production, ME/SEA imports
China’s growth has been the main support for the global economy since the Crisis began in Q4 2008. The slide above captures the extent of this in polyethylene (PE), one of the world’s largest chemical markets, based on data from China’s chemical association and Global Trade Information Services: The total market grew 11% in the 3 […]
Central banks have “attempted to manipulate asset prices and financial makets”
“The proper role for monetary policy is to work behind the scenes to promote long-term growth and price stability, yet central banks have instead attempted to “manipulate asset prices and financial markets” to fine-tune their economies. “I do not think this is a particularly healthy state of affairs for the central banks or our economies. […]
US automakers increase incentives as sales fail to boom
This month is likely to be a very good time to buy a new car in the US. The reason is that auto manufacturers had believed that a recovery in consumer spending and the economy had become inevitable. Thus they had built inventories of new cars in anticipation of the sales rush. These are now […]
Local buyers priced out of London housing market
Most people, if they are lucky, never get to see a property bubble during their lives. But those of us alive today have seen two distinct types of bubble in action: The first has been the Ponzi-type bubble sponsored by government lending policies, as seen in the subprime era and now in China. These take […]
UK tinkers with higher pension ages, ignores impact on GDP
Many readers have asked to see how the UK economy is being impacted by its ageing population, following the blog’s December series on the US, China, Japan, Germany and France. As the chart shows, it is in a very similar position to all of these countries: Life expectancy has increased by 17% to 81 years today, from […]
Q4 results show companies still waiting for something to turn up
We all live in hope. That seems to be the underlying message from the blog’s quarterly survey of company results. Nothing has changed since last quarter or indeed Q2, when BASF noted that “achieving our earnings target is significantly more challenging today than we had expected”. Yet this latest quarter was, of course, supposed to be […]
Jump to page: