Bubbles are great fun while they last. But they are much less fun when they burst. For the past 20 years, central bank stimulus has created some of the largest bubbles ever seen. But now, led by developments in Japan and China, they are bursting
Chemicals and the Economy
Investors should pack a copy of the Old Testament for the beach
Companies need to prepare for much slower, or maybe even negative growth and deflation. Optimistically, one can hope this paradigm shift will be good news for Net Zero investments. But it also makes it more difficult to reduce the vast debts created by recent stimulus programmes.
Bond yields start to go back to the future as stimulus policies unwind
Central banks have spent 15 years telling us that debt and demographics “don’t matter”. They claimed they could always create demand via stimulus. But now the policy has run out of road. Homeowners and stock traders who thought rates would stay low forever, will be the ones to suffer
Global economy set to go ex-growth as world population hits 8bn
Underlying growth has been slowing since 2000 as more people joined the Perennials generation. Now, the bursting of the central bank stimulus bubbles – combined with the impact of Russia’s invasion – will likely cause the global economy to go ex-growth.
The stock market bubble starts to burst
Exponential rapidly rising or falling markets usually go further than you think, but they do not correct by going sideways.
The blog’s 14th birthday – and the New Normal world it predicted has arrived
The blog has now been running for 14 years since the first post was written from Thailand at the end of June 2007. And quite a lot has happened since then: There was the 2008 financial crisis, one of the blog’s early forecasting successes This led to the publication of ‘Boom, Gloom and the New […]
Bankruptcies now the key risk as hopes for V-shaped recovery disappear
Governments, financial markets and central banks all originally assumed the Covid-19 pandemic would be over in a few days or weeks. But it is now clear they were wrong. And unfortunately, there is little sign of a Plan B emerging. The idea was that consumers would have plenty of money in their pockets after the […]
Markets face major paradigm shifts as recession approaches
Major paradigm shifts are occurring in the global economy, as I describe in a new analysis for ICIS Chemical Business Over the past 25 years, the budget process has tended to assume that the external environment will be relatively stable. 2008 was a shock at the time, of course, but many have now forgotten the […]
G7 births hit new record low, below Depression level in 1933
If a country doesn’t have any babies, then in time it won’t have an economy. But that’s not how the central banks see it. For the past 20 years, through subprime and now their stimulus policies, they have believed they could effectively “print babies”. Even today, they are still lining up to take global interest […]
Flexible working is key to reversing today’s collapse in fertility rates
Women in most parts of the world are not having enough children to replace our population. This is one of the great issues of our time, but is hardly ever discussed. Yet the issue is very topical, with Chinese births falling to a 60-year low last year. Only 15.23 million babies were born, the lowest […]
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