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Chemicals and the Economy

China’s lending bubble could now lead to zero GDP growth

China has been primarily responsible for driving global growth since the Crisis began in 2008.  Auto sales, for example, would have seen negative growth world-wide without China.  And auto manufacturing is the world’s largest manufacturing industry.  The chemical industry has been in a similar position.  Whilst China is also now responsible for nearly 50% of global […]

Seven global implications of China’s new policies

Everyone remembers the old joke, “Why did the elephant wear dark glasses?”, and the answer, “So that she wouldn’t be recognised”.  A new version popped into the blog’s mind this week, when finishing its new Research Note on the impact of China’s new policies on the global economy: “Why did nobody notice that China was the ‘elephant […]

And now the stumble?

Last week the US Federal Reserve announced the second move in its so-called tapering process, and reduced its bond buying by another $10bn/month.  But there was only a temporary repeat in stock markets of the enthusiastic response to its first reduction in December.  We are thus about to test whether the blog’s theory of ‘two steps and a […]

From Jiang to Hu and the lost decade

President Jiang Zemin inherited a difficult economic and political situation when taking power in 1993, as did Deng in 1977 and  current president Xi last year.  Jiang had to set in motion China’s second economic cycle of the post-Mao era, or risk seeing the country fall back into poverty and the political turmoil of another Cultural Revolution. Similarly today, […]

Xi Jinping needs to repeat his father’s economic success

Xi Jinping was formally confirmed as China’s new president this week. But we know remarkably little about him, apart from a rather dry list of his official positions as he climbed the career ladder. This is understandable, given the chaos that resulted from Mao’s personality cult and the Cultural Revolution. However, we do know something […]

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