On Wednesday I identified Dow Chemical as on the Cara Global Best 100 Companies list. Then on Thursday, Larry Kudlow interviewed Dow's CEO Andrew Liveris on Kudlow & Company.

The ability of Kudlow to talk over his guest is remarkable -- Don't you just love it when Larry tells his guest he has a quick 25 seconds to answer a question that books could be written about, AND THEN LARRY SPEAKS FOR THE NEXT 15 SECONDS!

Besides, with Mr. Liveris, an Aussie by birth, Larry went on and on with his over-the-top platitudes for the Australian Prime Minister Howard, while the audience was waiting to hear Mr. Liveris tell us about how DOW almost tripled first quarter earnings, and why he thought the global economy was improving faster than the skeptics.

But that's Larry.

Liveris did give the audience one solid piece of investment analysis when he told us that when it comes to companies like his whose fortunes rise and fall with cap ex spending that the most important metric is margin expansion. Without improving margins, as representative of pricing power, you can ignore the companies in the Basic Materials (and Industrials) sector -- except goldminers of course because those companies might deliberately not sell their production, or they might sell it forward, so margin analysis is out the window there.

Liveris told us that DOW has good demand plus supply shortages in his sector, and that he expected 2006 to get better than 2005. He added that lower oil costs would drop his material input costs, and that new legislation in his industry would provide a measure of predictability and cost certainty.

It's amazing what some people can get in edge wise when being interviewed by Kudlow.