Boom and bust cycles

Winter 1991). Consumer groups, such as the National Insurance Consumer Organization, charge that industry collusion and greed for investment income created this boom-and-bust cycle. 

Dairy producers. The dairy industry in Australia has suffered boom and bust cycles for most of the last hundred years though the competitive global food market has taken its toll over the last decade. A recent vote by dairy farmers will see deregulation with a levy imposed per litre to pay farmers to exit the industry over the next decade. Ironically this has come at a time when there is huge interest from Japan for Australia to supply organic... 

It was a boom-and-bust cycle. In this period, talent shortages in information technology coupled with large IT investments for year 2000 readiness raised the stature of the chief information officer (CIO). Multimillion-dollar investments in IT infrastructure were made based on a handshake, and hundreds of consultants were trained to implement new technologies to improve supply chain management. Good talent was hard to find. As a result, many process compromises were made. 

First, burrowing appears to have stabilized the planet s chemistry. It connected the oxygen and phosphorous cycles so that feedbacks between them would stabilize each and dampen the magnitude of later booms and busts. As a result, later events like the supposed third Great Oxidation Event were relatively less drastic. 

Commodity prices are typically volatile both intra-year and over several years, reflecting shifting demand and supply curves. For industrial commodities there is a traditional cycle of interaction between GDP-driven demand fluctuations and lags in supply which leads to pronounced boom-bust pricing variations. This is especially true in industries with a high minimum efficient scale (MES) of capacity such as oil refining and petrochemicals, where new plant may add materially to industry supply, leading to a big fall in prices. 

The ideal combination of size and fechnology has evidently not yet been found for polypropylene—Volker Traufz, former Chairman and CEO of Basell, told the author that the boom-bust business cycles over the years in this polymer have "effectively desfroyed all investments made in the product since the begirming (the late 1950s)." This would seem to be more a problem of persisfenf overcapacify fhan finding an ideal plant size, however. Industry-wide overcapacity is ever a risk in commodity polymers, particularly as globalization has sharpened competition worldwide. 

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