Matthieu Favas

speaker

190 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 12 Aug

Matthieu Favas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Economist Podcasts · Pump and circumstance: is China the new OPEC? · 12 Aug 2026 podcast

And Chinese demands also has fallen by quite a lot.

And this is one of the most puzzling aspects of all that.

You know, stocks you can understand, export controls you can understand.

But domestic demand falling and no impact on the economy is really striking.

And what we've seen, what we're starting to understand, is that there's been quite a big decrease in the use of motor fuels.

So commuters, for example, in cities they've stopped driving to work.

freight operators have switched to gas powered trucks, electric vehicles.

A lot of local governments have postponed or cancelled faster projects.

To save on diesel?

So all that's saved on fuel basically by probably double digit percent.

And then another thing that's less appreciated is that China's massive petrochemical industry, it needs a lot of petrochemical products.

Um and it has apparently managed to do without as much of them as before.

And that's partly because it found new ways to produce these basic ingredients for its plastics, and notably from coal and from other petroleum products that it had access to.

So it found workarounds and these workarounds seem to have worked.

And the lesson is some of these workarounds they've been invented during years where China was under pressure from Trump Starrish, for example.

Thus there's been a long history of trial and errors that explain why China's been in a position to be more flexible today.

So China's been able to do it for a few months now, so it tells you that they can last some distance.

And again, that's not like a miracle that's born out of today's necessity.

It's a strategy that's been developed over a few years.

It's billions in stead backed investment in renewables, in green transport that has made the energy system, the transport system much more flexible.

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