(Bloomberg) — Gold’s record-setting rally this year has puzzled market watchers as bullion has roared higher despite headwinds that should have held it back. With prices sagging this week, the explanation may lie in China.
After weeks of debate about whether a mystery buyer was stoking the rally, several prominent figures in the global gold market are coming to the conclusion that the major new driving force is a legion of fleet-footed retail investors on the Shanghai Futures Exchange.
Stepping up liquefied natural gas exports would help Asia lower emissions by getting off coal and boost Canada’s economy at the same time
Pierre Poilievre‘s Axe the (carbon) Tax campaign is a spectacular success. But the Conservative party needs its own plan to reduce fossil fuel emissions. Paradoxically, it’s a fossil fuel that provides the answer. Canada’s rich endowment of natural gas offers us the chance to both reduce global emissions and also rescue a Canadian economy ravaged by the Liberal government.
How? By exporting liquefied natural gas (LNG) to China, Japan, South Korea and the other coal-dependent Asia Pacific countries. Switching from coal to natural gas reduces CO2 emissions by 50 per cent while also eliminating the toxic compounds and lung-clogging particulates that shorten the lives of millions living in smog-stricken Asian cities.
TORONTO, April 23 (Reuters) – Canada and its Five Eyes Alliance partners are working on put forward a response to tackle the price manipulation of critical metals, Canada’s Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said on Tuesday.
The U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have what is called the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network and the finance ministers from these countries met last Thursday for the spring session of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington.
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Ottawa has granted Airbus a waiver from sanctions targeting Russian titanium that could interfere with its business in Canada, two government sources say. Reports of the decision Wednesday prompted anger from Ukrainian Canadians and criticism from the Official Opposition.
The sanctions in question were only applied by Canada in February this year. Back then, Ottawa announced sanctions on Russia’s VSMPO-AVISMA Corporation, one of the world’s largest producers of titanium.
BHP Group Ltd. proposed a takeover of Anglo American Plc that valued the smaller miner at £31.1 billion (US$38.9 billion), in a deal that would create the world’s top copper producer while sparking the industry’s biggest shakeup in over a decade.
The biggest mining company proposed an all-share deal in which Anglo would first spin off controlling stakes in South African platinum and iron ore companies to its shareholders before being acquired by BHP. The total per-share value of the non-binding proposal was about £25.08, BHP said, a 14 per cent premium to Anglo’s closing share price on Wednesday.
Copper prices have risen all week, buoyed by surging investor confidence amidst ongoing concerns over tight supply conditions for the metal. The London Metal Exchange (LME) saw copper prices climb as much as 4.4 per cent this week from Monday’s level.
‘This is the second secular bull market that we’ve seen in copper this century, and it’s just starting now,” said Max Layton, global head of commodities research at Citi. “Investors have been holding off [but] they just can’t afford to hold off anymore. A very large number of [them] have a small to moderate copper position now that they didn’t have six to eight weeks ago.”
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Since Rio Tinto bought Canada’s Alcan in 2007, the Anglo-Australian mining giant has been good at making big promises, but slow to fulfill them. This is especially proving to be the case with its plan to produce zero-carbon aluminum.
The Quebec aluminum operations that Alcan built up over more than 80 years until its US$40-billion takeover by Rio Tinto remain among the world’s most profitable. Rio’s eight wholly and jointly owned smelters in the province mostly rely on cheap and emissions-free hydroelectric power from dams that Alcan itself built, providing a competitive and environmental advantage over U.S., Chinese and Russian rivals that use coal-based electricity.
(Bloomberg) — A little-known Australian company is becoming the Western face of a Chinese nickel behemoth. In under a decade, Nickel Industries Ltd. has gone from a relatively small miner to the world’s sixth-biggest producer of a metal used in products from batteries to stainless steel.
Riding a Chinese-led boom in Indonesia’s nickel sector, it owns or has stakes in five plants in the country that churn out more of the commodity than household names like BHP Group Ltd.
Honda has agreed to establish a new, multibillion-dollar electric vehicle operation in Ontario, according to government sources.
OTTAWA — Japanese automaker Honda has agreed to establish a major new, multibillion-dollar electric vehicle operation in Ontario, according to federal and provincial government sources.
The deal is expected to be announced Thursday at Honda’s existing factory in Alliston, north of Toronto, where the company will reveal plans to bring a “massive project” to Ontario for the manufacturing of electric vehicles, batteries and other components, government sources with knowledge of the situation told the Star.
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Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland says Canada and its allies are weighing taking trade action against China and Indonesia in the nickel market, as the two Asian countries tighten their collective grip in the critical mineral.
Indonesia has gone from supplying 7 per cent of the global output of nickel to 55 per cent in the past decade, with much of that new production controlled by China-based mining companies with ties to the authoritarian Beijing government.
Electing high-profile, but incompetent, candidates such as Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump reduced the status of their respective countries on the world stage
In 2015 and 2016, Canadians and Americans both elected an incompetent celebrity who lacked the credentials to govern. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and former U.S. president Donald Trump both reduced the status of their respective countries on the world stage.
But Trudeau has also damaged Canada’s economy, housing market and health-care system, while increasing taxes and racking up huge amounts of debt, earning him derision from experts and pundits on both sides of the border.
TORONTO, April 22 (Reuters) – Canada’s capital gains tax hike for wealthy individuals and corporations in last week’s federal budget risks turning away investments from mineral exploration by reducing incentives, the country’s leading stock exchange operator and dealmakers told Reuters.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government proposed increasing the share of capital gains subject to taxation to two-thirds for individuals with annual investment profits greater than C$250,000 ($181,752), companies and trusts, as it seeks to raise revenue to fund public programs.
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Talk about an inconvenient truth. After months of trying to explain away the gathering clouds over the electric-vehicle sector as the usual growing pains of an emerging market, the EV faithful swallowed a bitter pill this week when Tesla finally blinked.
The market and spiritual leader of EVs said it will lay off more than 10 per cent of its work force, more than 14,000 people, because of slowing global demand. The company’s deliveries have dropped for the first time in four years, and unsold inventory has swelled to almost 50,000 vehicles.
(Kitco News) – Last Friday at midnight, the London Metal Exchange (LME) and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) enacted the most comprehensive limitation on Russian exports to date: a ban on all Russian metal produced after April 12. The move was made to bring the LME into compliance with the latest U.S. and U.K. sanctions imposed following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The goal is to prevent Russia from being able to profit from the export of metal produced by companies such as Rusal (aluminum) and Nornickel (nickel) which help the country fund its ongoing military operations in Ukraine.
Canada’s top uranium producer, used to being overlooked at global climate forums, got front-row billing last year in Dubai. But will this nuclear renaissance stick?
Tim Gitzel was accustomed to being overlooked by the organizers of the United Nations’ annual climate change conference, a.k.a. COP. The meeting attracts a who’s who of the decarbonize-by-2050-or-else crowd to a different city each year, and they bat around big ideas, make lofty pronouncements, set emissions targets and try to hammer out a framework to achieve them.
But Gitzel was never invited to join in the fun. The longtime chief executive of Cameco Corp., the Saskatoon-based mining giant that supplies about 20 per cent of the uranium used to fuel zero-emissions nuclear reactors worldwide, joked that the only way he could get close to COP was to sit in the “McDonald’s across the street” from the meeting. “Nobody wanted to talk to us,” he said. “Nuclear just wasn’t on the agenda.”
