A Mars Bar feast in store if crude hits $30/bbl again Source of Picture: Amazon.com Polyethylene (PE) inventories in China at the second and third local distributor levels are at very high levels, two reliable industry sources have told us. This has led to some confusion in the […]
Asian Chemical Connections
Will Fiscal Rebalancing Trigger A Trade War?
Ron Kirk faces a tough balancing act Source of Picture: United States Mission – Geneva “The rebuilt American economy must be export-oriented and less consumption-oriented,” said Larry Summers, Director of the US President’s National Economic Council, earlier this month. But, as The Economist says in this article, this will be a little like turning a […]
Another Opinion: China and Recycling
Source of Picture: The Earth Institute at Columbia University I was speaking to a Singapore-based trader this morning over the reasons behind the polyolefin price rally. PPPEPrices2006-Aug09.ppt Here are his views: “A maor factor has been a lack of availability of recycled material. This is because people in the West are buying less durable consumer […]
Asia Polyolefins: “Bloodbath” Postponed
Source of Picture : purchasing.com In his own words, here is how one contact describes the current situation with a couple of extra points added by yours truly (with links) “We’ve seen arbitrage close from Europe on polyolefins with no new business since April-May. Some material was delivered in June but this was merely May […]
Dalian LLDPE futures explained?
My last blog entry quoted a North American industry source who was concerned over the potential for physical delivery on the Dalian futures exchange to flood the real market and send prices crashing. In my ignorance of how futures markets works, and as a typicaql semi-numerate journalist, I therefore asked a colleague with a futures/mathematical […]
Futures, Recycling Behind China PE Mystery?
Picture: The China Daily “I’ve given up trying to read the polyolefin market in China. I just can’t figure out what’s going on,” said a senior source with a major North American producer late last week. “I keep returning to the fundamentals and cannot understand why prices have risen so steeply since mid-February.” Him and […]
Artificial price support about to disappear
Source of picture: gilesbowkett.blogspot.com The excellent daily energy and shipping report, The Schork Report said today that the bottom had “fallen out of the entire (energy) complex.” With the Bulls on the defensive, the authors believe that crude could retreat towards $60/bbl. Natural gas markets are so oversupplied that prices in the region of $2/mBTU […]
Where is the real demand recovery?
Have you ever been away on holiday and have cut yourself off from from work, only to return and find that nothing has changed? So it seems in polyolefin markets. As this blog has been writing about for several months, the recovery in pricing seems to have been mainly feedstock-driven as this article from ICIS […]
Back to the Serious Stuff: Fitch issues China warning
As I’ve been warning on this blog for some time, the explosion of credit in China has created a great deal of paper-bottomed optimism over the recovery. Fitch, the ratings agency, has just raised its macro-prudential risk indicator ffor China from category 1 (safe) to category 3 (Iceland et al) because of the lending surge […]
Does anyone have a clue?
Cartoon: Peter Brookes, The Times Yes, this blog has gone staggeringly quiet over the last few weeks as I gained a life: I went home to the UK and mixed with some people who had no interest in or desire to know anything about polypropylene. Do you realise that there are some people out there […]
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