Exponential rapidly rising or falling markets usually go further than you think, but they do not correct by going sideways.
Chemicals and the Economy
The blog’s 14th birthday – and the New Normal world it predicted has arrived
The blog has now been running for 14 years since the first post was written from Thailand at the end of June 2007. And quite a lot has happened since then: There was the 2008 financial crisis, one of the blog’s early forecasting successes This led to the publication of ‘Boom, Gloom and the New […]
Bankruptcies now the key risk as hopes for V-shaped recovery disappear
Governments, financial markets and central banks all originally assumed the Covid-19 pandemic would be over in a few days or weeks. But it is now clear they were wrong. And unfortunately, there is little sign of a Plan B emerging. The idea was that consumers would have plenty of money in their pockets after the […]
Markets face major paradigm shifts as recession approaches
Major paradigm shifts are occurring in the global economy, as I describe in a new analysis for ICIS Chemical Business Over the past 25 years, the budget process has tended to assume that the external environment will be relatively stable. 2008 was a shock at the time, of course, but many have now forgotten the […]
G7 births hit new record low, below Depression level in 1933
If a country doesn’t have any babies, then in time it won’t have an economy. But that’s not how the central banks see it. For the past 20 years, through subprime and now their stimulus policies, they have believed they could effectively “print babies”. Even today, they are still lining up to take global interest […]
Flexible working is key to reversing today’s collapse in fertility rates
Women in most parts of the world are not having enough children to replace our population. This is one of the great issues of our time, but is hardly ever discussed. Yet the issue is very topical, with Chinese births falling to a 60-year low last year. Only 15.23 million babies were born, the lowest […]
Boomer SuperCycle unique in human history – Deutsche Bank
“The 1950-2000 period is like no other in human or financial history in terms of population growth, economic growth, inflation or asset prices.” This quote isn’t from ‘Boom, Gloom and the New Normal: How Western BabyBoomers are Changing Demand Patterns, Again‘, the very popular ebook that John Richardson and I published in 2011. Nor is […]
Why everyone ignored my warnings ahead of the financial crisis
It’s 10 years since my forecast of a global financial crisis came true, as Lehman Brothers collapsed. I had warned of this consistently here in the blog, and in the Letters column of the Financial Times. But, of course, nobody wanted to listen whilst the party was going strong. As the FT’s world trade editor wrote […]
Financial crises and the five stages of loss
The Financial Times has kindly printed my letter as their lead letter, arguing that the rise of the populists emphasises the risk of continuing to deny the impact of today’s ageing populations on the economy. Sir, Martin Wolf’s sobering analysis of policymakers’ post-crisis decision to “go back to the past”, ( “Why so little has changed since […]
The tide of global debt has peaked: 8 charts suggest what may happen next, as the tide retreats
The results of the central bankers’ great experiment with money printing are now in, and they are fairly depressing, as the charts above confirm: On the left are the IMF’s annual forecasts from 2010 – 2018 (dotted lines) and the actual result (black) Until recently, the Fund was convinced the world would soon see 5% […]