Archive for January, 2020

How To Get Beer Around Congo

Courtesy of The Economist, an interesting look at the logistics challenges of doing business in the Democratic Republic of Congo: The barge, weighed down by half a million bottles of beer, pulls out into the middle of the Congo river. At its tip, breezy rumba music drifts out of a small radio and a group […]

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How Chinese Financing is Fueling Megaprojects Around the World

Via The Visual Capitalist, a look at how Chinese financing is fueling large scale projects worldwide: On a mountaintop a few miles north of the bustling streets of Harare, Zimbabwe, a curving, modern complex is beginning to take shape. This building, once completed, will be the home of the African country’s parliament, and the centerpiece […]

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Chinese-Built Pakistani Port Begins Handling Afghan Transit Trade

Via VoA News, a report on the newly opened Gwadar port: Pakistan’s newly opened southwestern Gwadar seaport has begun handling transit cargo headed to and from landlocked Afghanistan, marking a significant outcome of Islamabad’s multi-billion-dollar collaboration with China.   Officials said the first ship full of Afghan cargo containers reached Gwadar on Tuesday. The containers […]

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Foreign Companies Left Out of China’s Belt-and-Road Initiative

Via The Wall Street Journal, a report on how Beijing ‘is offering the financing, the building, the equipment—even the labor’ for its Belt and Road Initiative: Roughly seven years after Beijing launched a high-profile transcontinental infrastructure program aimed at building goodwill abroad and boosting economic cooperation with the rest of the world, some foreign companies say […]

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Angola: Growing Beyond Oil

Via the IFC, a look at Angola’s potential beyond petroleum: Home to one of the most expensive cities in Africa and one of the least diversified economies, Angola wants to be known for something entirely different: being a magnet for private investment. The country’s economy has been fueled by oil, which accounts for a third […]

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The North Korean Economy in 2019: Treading but Not Underwater in the New Year

Via 38 North, a look at North Korea’s economy: Although 2019 was not a good year for the North Korean economy, it was also not disastrous. Kim Jong Un will not be able to make much headway this year in implementing his vision of greater prosperity for the North Korean people as long as sanctions […]

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WILDCATS AND BLACK SHEEP
Wildcats & Black Sheep is a personal interest blog dedicated to the identification and evaluation of maverick investment opportunities arising in frontier - and, what some may consider to be, “rogue” or “black sheep” - markets around the world.

Focusing primarily on The New Seven Sisters - the largely state owned petroleum companies from the emerging world that have become key players in the oil & gas industry as identified by Carola Hoyos, Chief Energy Correspondent for The Financial Times - but spanning other nascent opportunities around the globe that may hold potential in the years ahead, Wildcats & Black Sheep is a place for the adventurous to contemplate & evaluate the emerging markets of tomorrow.