We’ve all had that moment of jumping into the car, and turning on the ignition, only to realise we forgot to fill up the fuel tank on the last journey. US auto sales data for April is flashing that same familiar orange warning light. From the outside, everything looked fine with the data. Although there […]
Chemicals and the Economy
54000 millionaires needed to buy new London apartments
‘Nothing succeeds like excess’. That seems to be the motto of London property developers at the moment. According to researchers LonRes, developers are currently building or planning the staggering total of 54000 new luxury homes in central London. These will all be offered at prices of £1m ($1.5m) and higher, according to the Financial Times. Yet just 3900 […]
US economic recovery at risk as energy bubble bursts
The bursting of the US energy bubble is looking more and more like a replay of the sub-prime bubble in 2008. As investor Warren Buffett has noted, “its only when the tide goes out, that you learn who has been swimming naked .” And nearly a year ago, former central banker William White warned the problems in the global economy were: “Worse […]
Great Unwinding of policymaker stimulus creates interest rate risk
Interest rate risk is rising in the developed economies as the Great Unwinding of policymaker stimulus continues. Since the blog first highlighted this Unwinding last month: Oil prices have continued to tumble, with Brent now down over $15/bbl from its late-June peak The US$ has continued to rise from multi-year lows versus the yen, euro and pound And of course, […]
China’s housing market enters New Normal as prices slide
Markets appear to be continuing to move, slowly but surely, into their expected ‘scary phase’. The reason is the massive distortions that have been created in financial markets, and in China’s housing market, by the $35tn+ of stimulus from governments and central banks since 2009. Unwinding these distortions will not be simple. The stimulus has not returned us […]
Dow’s CEO says “pre-2008 economy was a bubble”
Now its official. Andrew Liveris, Dow CEO, told CNBC last week that the “pre-2008 economy was a bubble“. And exactly mirroring the analysis of Boom, Gloom and the New Normal, he went on to add that “for a couple of years after 2008, we had a head-fake that the growth might have returned, but it […]
$15bn gold loan scam revealed: Beijing property sales fall 50%
Almost every day brings new revelations about the growing evidence of major fraud in China’s ‘collateral trade’. Yet the world’s financial markets remain very complacent. They have forgotten the basic rule, that the first example is usually the tip of the iceberg – not a one-off mistake. They have also forgotten that the real problems only emerge when […]
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