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Austerity is in the news again, as the Greek/Eurozone debt negotiations continue. So it seems interesting to see how financial market sentiment has been moving with regard to the issues of austerity and stimulus. The above chart is therefore modeled on the familiar IeC Boom/Gloom Index It shows the ratio of sentiment for Austerity versus […]
Fears of Austerity rise again, as Stimulus proves ineffective Read More
3 years ago, two Harvard professors published a book with the eye-catching title, “This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly”. Marketed as “the landmark work of financial crises”, it went straight into the best-seller lists and became…
Policymakers seek simple answers to complex issues Read More
The 2012-14 Budget period offers great opportunities, as well as great challenges.
Will companies continue to focus on short-term developments in financial markets? Michael Porter’s Shared Value concept instead offers us a powerful model for creat…
Its the ‘big picture’ issues that we need to watch these days, no longer detailed forecasts of individual product growth rates. They are driving chemical product sales in every major region.
The chart above from the Financial Times highlights Europ…
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) says Asian governments ‘are caught in the pincer grips of slowing growth and rising inflation’. Whilst the cost of subsidies is ballooning. India, for example, will spend $42.5bn in oil subsidies this year, ‘six times
Fuel subsidies are set to double this year to at least $100bn, according to the head of the International Energy Agency (IEA), Nobuo Tanaka. This is in spite of the fact that some countries such as Taiwan have recently abolished
Last month, I noted the suggestion by leading bankers that interest rates would probably rise by the end of May. The rationale for this view was that the bigger, stronger banks seemed to have got fed up with subsidising the