Global demand is continuing to slow, yet chemical industry capacity is continuing to ramp up. As a result, supply gluts are likely to appear in many key areas as we move into the second half of the year. That is the key conclusion from the latest American Chemistry Council data for global chemical capacity and […]
Chemicals and the Economy
Central banks head for currency wars as growth policies fail
The world’s central bankers would have been sacked long ago if they were CEOs running companies. They would also have been voted out, if they were elected officials. Not only have they failed to achieve their promised objectives – constant growth and 2% inflation – they have kept failing to achieve them since the Crisis […]
Chemicals, the “flea on the tail of the currency/interest rate dog”
Markets are becoming increasingly chaotic, as the world’s major central banks each try to devalue their currencies. They have created a traders’ paradise, with oil on a particularly wild ride. But this has not been based on supply/demand fundamentals. Instead, it has been due to hedge funds jumping back into the commodities market. They don’t […]
Global GDP saw record fall in 2015 – new IMF data
New data from the International Monetary Fund confirms that last year’s collapse in global GDP was even worse than first reported. As the chart shows,the fall when measured in current dollars was a record $4.7tn, versus $3.3tn in 2009. And GDP was down 6% in percentage terms versus 5.3% in 2009: Even more worrying is […]
Hedge funds exit oil price rally as Saudi plans post-oil economy
“Within 20 years, we will be an economy or state that doesn’t depend mainly on oil“. This critical statement from Saudi Arabia’s deputy Crown Prince has been lost in the hype surrounding Q1’s hedge fund-inspired rally in oil, commodities and Emerging Markets. There has seldom been a better example of markets failing to see the […]
Reality battles illusion in world financial markets
“Buy on the rumour, sell on the news” is one of the most reliable definitions for a weak market. And that seems to have been the picture in Q1 across commodity, stock and bond markets. The key issue is the ongoing battle between Reality and Illusion: Reality accepts that ageing populations have lower levels of […]
The end of the Economic SuperCycle
A paradigm shift is underway in global petrochemical and polymer markets, as I discuss in a new article for ICIS Chemical Business. Previously successful business models, based on the supply-driven principle, no longer work. As our new study, “Demand – the New Direction for Profit”, explains, companies now need to adopt demand-led strategies if they […]
Central banks cannot control economic fortune of 7.3bn people
Trillions of dollars have been spent on stimulus by central banks in the developed world since the financial crisis began in 2008. Clearly these policies haven’t worked – but they are now lining up to do more of them. In this interview with Tom Brown, deputy editor of ICIS news, I argue that their analysis […]
$1.8tn of stimulus later, Japan’s household spending unchanged
3 years of massive stimulus spending in Japan has had no impact on the problem it was supposed to solve. This is highlighted by new government data on household spending for 2015, as the charts above confirm – they compare 2015 data with that for 2012, before Abenomics began: Spending was almost exactly the same […]
IEA says market “awash with oil” – debunks bullish myths
Oil markets are the proverbial “canary in the coalmine”. They are showing us what happens when the rose-tinted glasses provided by stimulus policy are removed. Now markets have to return to their true role of price discovery, based on the fundamentals of supply and demand. This makes them very dangerous indeed. Some large players in […]
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