Get ready to open your wallets a bit more. Whether you are in the chemical business, the services industry or the business of feeding people, the cost of business continues to rise. As those costs rise, so too are the number of questions surrounding the emergence of inflation into economies hoping to emerge from the […]
Chemical Connections
Immense challenges facing chemical, polymer procurers
Mid-February’s prolonged freeze on the Texas-Louisiana coast has juiced up market commentary as much as it has most petrochemical and polymer pricing. Just days after the storm, a polyethylene (PE) trader said that the freeze’s effects on regional and global supplies would be “worse than Hurricane Harvey”. Perhaps so, because not long after, a PE […]
Great news buried beneath recent vaccine headlines
With news bubbling up about coronavirus variants, here is a variant message of my own: Look past the recent coronavirus headlines and you will find some extremely hopeful developments. The remarkably high efficacy rates for the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines quickly spoiled us after health experts for months said that anything over 50% effective would […]
Three markets to watch amid stimulus efforts
The Democrat Party sweep of the Georgia runoff senatorial elections this week means President-elect Joseph Biden will take office on 20 January with his party in control of both houses of Congress and thus an easier path to enacting the policies on which he campaigned. The blog previously outlined some possibilities for pandemic-recovery economic stimulus […]
3 stimulus possibilities under the Biden administration
US president-elect Joseph Biden has called the recently passed $900bn second round of coronavirus-related economic stimulus a down-payment to what he will promote passage of after he is sworn into office on 20 January 2021. What that third round of stimulus will look like will be shaped in part by the two 5 January 2021 […]
Good recycling news plants seeds for further advances
This year continues to be a “slog,” a word when said aloud just reeks of 2020. I guess that would be onomatopoeia for those you who remember your high school literature lessons and/or author Edgar Allan Poe. Hence, it’s doubly joyful when some good news comes along such as Chevron Phillips Chemical’s (CPChem) announcement on […]
Chemical market whack-a-mole
Anyone ever play whack-a-mole? The image here comes from the 1990s, a time of ill-fitting T-shirts and no smartphones, so entertainment came from games such as whack-a-mole that sprung up (literally) to test our hand-eye coordination as well as our ability to deal with a new problem cropping up just as soon as we had […]
The US economy’s hall of mirrors
The US economic recovery from pandemic-induced shutdowns is about as disjointed an endeavour as I can recall. Recent data releases and surveys paint a quite jumbled picture. Take this week’s Beige Book release from the Federal Reserve, which distils inputs from regional Reserve bank surveys into the following summation: Employment – Up overall since falling […]
The pandemic and petrochemicals demand: a whole new approach is required
By John Richardson MONITORING demand has never been harder because of the pandemic. One of my colleagues on the ICIS Pricing team was, for example, last week told by one of his reliable contacts that polyethylene (PE) demand was good, bad or indifferent. It used to be that if you talked to the people you […]
China’s new five-year-plan to accelerate petrochemicals self-sufficiency
By John Richardson IT IS ONCE again a critical moment in forecasting the direction of China’s petrochemicals industry and with it, of course, the direction of the global industry, as the global industry so heavily depends on China. If China’s deficits were to entirely disappear, what would many of us then do for a […]
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