A now ruined Caribbean castle built by a 19th century buccaneer is among the latest beneficiaries of China’s increasing push to offer development finance around the world.
The burnt-out shell of Sam Lord’s Castle stands on a stretch of shoreline on the island nation of Barbados. The former British colony is looking to China as an alternative source of financing because its status as a middle-income country doesn’t qualify it for funding on preferential terms from international development organizations.
It’s not alone: figures from the Inter-American Dialogue, a U.S.-based policy analysis center, and Boston University show China provided more financing to Latin America in 2015 than the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank combined. Meantime, China remains a major investor in Africa and has started the $100 billion Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which may announce its first batch of investments midyear.
Barbados’s first major financing deal with China was signed late last year -- a $170 million loan to renovate the castle built by pirate Sam Lord. He amassed a fortune by plundering ships that became trapped on coral reefs near his estate.
"When President Xi Jinping of China visited the Caribbean in 2013 one of the things he promised was $3 billion in loans and concessional financing," Chelston Brathwaite, Barbados’s ambassador to China, said in a phone interview. "Our country seeks to participate in this offer and see how we can capture some of these funds for infrastructure development in order to promote economic activity in our country."
The national department of agriculture recently reported that Chile sold $163 million in bottled fine wine to China last year, overtaking its sales to the United Kingdom and the United States. Now, that may not sound like a whopping sum; it's only a fraction of the estimated $258 billion in global wine sales. But it means a lot to Chile, one of the so-called New World winemaking countries, which is aggressively trying to carve out its place in world markets. It's also a lesson for other Latin American nations still stuck on a Chinese-driven commodities treadmill.
China's breakneck industrial growth over the last decade drove production across the Americas, as nations rich in raw materials pumped iron ore, beef, soybeans and oil into the dragon's maw. But the commodities boom has passed, sending prices of copper, Chile's main source of export dollars, to a six-year low. Now most Latin American producers are sitting on inventory and dreaming of moving up the value chain.
That's where ambitious New World winemakers, such as Australia, South Africa and Chile, saw an opportunity. A few years back, the business media was flush with stories of newly rich Asians avid for luxury brands, and willing to pay top yuan to wash down their gourmet meals with the best of Bordeaux or Tuscany. Even now, the Chinese millionaire's dream du jour is to buy a chateau in France.
And yet as China's wealth trickled down, so did the taste for finer things. By 2012, China was drinking more red wine than France. That's been a boon for low-end national brands; the best-known domestic label, Great Wall, may not win many blind tastings, but goes for a palate-cleansing $5 or so a bottle.
Increasingly, however, it's the middle class that's driving China's consumer market: discerning college students and young professionals who are shopping for better but still affordable brands, something between a Petrus and plonk.
Enter Chile, a land of traditional and tech-savvy vintners, heralded for their highly regarded if lesser-known wines, and modest prices. Production is soaring, thanks to falling grape prices and a weaker peso, which makes the South American country's wine more competitive abroad. That combination has helped Chile grab market share from more august wine producers in global markets: In 2015, Chile sold more wine to Japan than France.
South Korea’s institutional investors are putting money in debt to buy Manhattan and San Francisco skyscrapers as they flee record-low bond yields and falling shares at home.
A group of Korean insurance companies is investing about $220 million in a mezzanine loan, which is repaid after senior debt in case of a default, for the 54-story AXA Equitable Center at 787 Seventh Avenue in Manhattan this month, people familiar with the matter said last week. The Teachers’ Pension is underwriting a combined $100 million mezzanine debt along with other domestic funds for the 32-story Westin St. Francis hotel in San Francisco, the fund’s first investment abroad in such loans.
Korea, with an aging population and a national pension fund with 507 trillion won ($414.2 billion) in assets, was the fourth-biggest foreign investor in U.S. offices last year, according to Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. data. Driving the foray abroad are 10-year won sovereign yields that dropped 60 basis points in the past year and a benchmark share index that lost 3 percent.
“It’s hard to make money from the stock or bond market,’’ said Kim Chang Ho, the Seoul-based head of the global alternative investment team at Teachers’ Pension, the nation’s second-largest public retirement fund with 12.8 trillion won of assets. “Real estate mezzanine debt is relatively safe compared with equity investment while offering higher yields than senior loans. It’s not easy to secure these deals given they’re scarce and the competition among investors is heating up.’’
Surging sales in the piping hot real estate markets of Toronto and Vancouver last month prompted one of Canada’s big banks to express concerns Tuesday that the cities may be at risk of a home price correction.
The Canadian Real Estate Association reported Tuesday that sales of existing homes rose by eight per cent in January compared to a year ago, while the national average home price soared 17 per cent.
But it was the sales figures for Vancouver and Toronto that drew considerable notice from economists.
The average sale price in greater Vancouver rose 32.3 per cent year-over-year to nearly $1.1 million, while in greater Toronto it climbed 14.2 per cent to $631,092.
[. . .]
The price gains in Vancouver and Toronto fuelled a rise in Canada’s national average home price in January to $470,297, CREA said.
When excluding Ontario and British Columbia, however, the average sale price actually edged lower by 0.3 per cent from a year ago to $286,911.
What is today recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s largest underground shopping complex — and what Financial District BIA executive director Grant Humes says “has turned into probably our busiest pedestrian street in the city” — is just a series of basements of different buildings. It emerged from private landlords agreeing to link together the underground shopping concourses in their various buildings. It was not designed with an eye to people moving across the city through it — it was never intended to be the privately-owned neighbourhood that it has essentially become.
As Humes says, “There is no overriding set of rules. There is no one behind the curtain, quite honestly, thinking about it and pulling the levers on a regular basis.”
Though the city has, since the 1980s, acted as the “co-ordinating agency,” all the sections of the path are owned and controlled, as the city says on its website, “by the owner of the property through which it runs.”
Having twice this week attempted specific journeys through the PATH — from Atrium on Bay to WaterPark Place and from WaterPark Place to City Hall — and having twice gotten lost on the way, I can observe that this understanding of how the PATH evolved and functions is essential to navigating it using existing signage.
The “streets” in the underground have no names, and don’t follow the above-ground grid pattern most Torontonians are used to. Instead the signs and maps rely on knowledge of building names or addresses — and the signs present them to you one at a time.
So, for instance, to get from the Ferry Docks to City Hall, you enter at WaterPark Place, then travel through One York, Air Canada Centre, 25 York, Union Station, Royal Bank Plaza, Toronto-Dominion Centre, First Canadian Place, 121 King West, the Richmond Adelaide Centre, the Sheraton Hotel, and then finally into City Hall (through the parking garage).
If you can keep that list of names, in order, in your head, there’s still some difficulty in finding the signs that direct you to the next destination (especially in Union Station, which remains under significant reconstruction), but you can generally find your way once you do.
A biologist might study, let’s say, a particular species of rabbit, spending years in the field observing a population of them. A botanist might do the same with a specific grass or tree. But ecologists? They study life, too, but in whole systems at once. An ecologist might study the rabbit, the grass, and add in the local wolf population too. That’s because she’s less interested in the behaviors and traits of one species and more interested in how they interact.
Then the ecologist might build a food web model that reflects things like how a drop in the rabbit population affects wolves, and vice versa. The ecologist could also layer in a drought, a fire, the introduction of a new species of plant, or the long-term impact of climate change. All of those forces will interact with each other to form a dynamic ecosystem. Everything depends on everything else.
Cities may not look like natural ecosystems, but they are prime examples of networks where everything is interdependent. That makes ecology a great method for studying those interactions and their consequences. It’s just that in addition to examining forces like predation or changing rainfall, you have to add in things like politics and and socioeconomic status. According to the speakers on an urban ecology panel on Monday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Washington, DC, this idea isn’t about studying the interaction of cities and nature, counting the dispirited frogs trying to eke out a life next to a creek running through a suburb. It’s about using ecological tools to reframe cities as urban biomes, where factors as disparate as climate, green space policy, and economic inequality all interact to create unique ecosystems for the people (and plants and animals) that live in them.
Take Austin, Texas. In the early 20th century, the city forcibly relocated African American residents to Austin’s east side, where environmental factors had created a place with poor drainage and fewer trees. As the city developed, politicians invested in ecological infrastructure—like parks, trees, and bike lanes—on the white side of town. “Valued” species like native pecan trees ended up in rich, white neighborhoods; the plants in African American neighborhoods were more likely to be whatever the cheapest species was at Walmart, regardless of origin and ecosystem function. “Urban nature reflects wealth,” said panelist Stephanie Pincetl, an urban planner at UCLA. To understand Austin’s tree distribution, then, it’s more helpful to look at socioeconomic patterns and the city’s history of racism rather than environmental factors like climate or soil type.
The fact that environmental and social policies are so intertwined in cities has created some unexpected feedback loops, just like ecologists expect to see in a natural environment. “The African American community has been disproportionately burdened by how the city has developed,” said Sarah Dooling, an urban ecologist at the University of Texas and an Austin resident herself. So for example, due to underinvestment in green spaces on the east side of the city, only 30 percent of bus stations are shaded, either by trees or a roof. That’s an ecological choice that disproportionately affects people who use public transit.
An abrupt decision by Laurentian University to shut down its campus in Barrie, Ont., has left more than 200 students unable to finish their degrees in the city where they began.
Laurentian will close down the Barrie programs, long held at Georgian College, in May 2017 — except for its social work students, who will be allowed to stay until they graduate in 2019.
Their special status, which Laurentian said honours the work placements they have in the community, has sparked outrage by students in other programs, who jammed a protest meeting this week with the university president to demand the same chance to finish their degrees in Barrie.
“It shouldn’t matter what program you’re in; you should be able to finish your degree where you started. Laurentian has an obligation to see us through our four years of education in Barrie,” said political science student Jeremy Ross, president of the Laurentian Students’ Union, who said some 150 students jammed into the meeting “and they were pretty angry."
[. . .]
Laurentian president Dominic Giroux said the board of governors unanimously decided to withdraw from Barrie over recommendations from a provincial report that future Laurentian arts students in Barrie be taught in the first two years of their program by Georgian College instructors, not the university’s own professors. The report, by former cabinet minister John Gerretsen, also advised limiting the space Laurentian could use at the community college to less than one-third what the university wanted.
The report was commissioned by Queen’s Park last year after it turned down Laurentian’s bid for a new stand-alone campus in the boom town of Barrie. Giroux said the university was leaving Barrie “over a difference in vision.”
In a shocking announcement, Russian scientists say they want to test improved ballistic missiles on the asteroid Apophis, which is expected to come dangerously close to Earth in 2036. If this doesn’t send chills down your spine, you haven’t read enough science fiction.
In a February 11th article in the Russian state-owned news agency TASS, Sabit Saitgarayev, the lead researcher at the Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau, says Russian scientists are developing a program to upgrade Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) to destroy near-Earth meteors from 20-50 metres in size. Apophis’ approach in 2036 would be a test for this program.
ICBM’s are the kind of long range nukes that the USSR and the USA had pointed at each other for decades during the Cold War. They still have some pointed at each other, and they can be launched quickly. This program would take that technology and improve it for anti-asteroid use.
Typical rockets of the type that take payloads into space are not good candidates for intercepting asteroids. They require too much lead time to meet the threat of an incoming asteroid that might be detected only days before impact. They can take several days to fuel. But ICBM’s are different. They can stand at the ready for long periods of time, and be launched at a moment’s notice. But to be suitable for use as asteroid killers, they have to be upgraded.
Design work on the asteroid-killing ICBM’s has already begun, admitted Saitgarayev, but he did not say whether the money has been committed or whether the authorization has been given to go ahead with the project. But like a lot of things that are said and done by Russia, it’s difficult to know exactly where the truth lies.
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