Has West Africa Become ‘Un-Investable’?
February 17th, 2025
Via The Assay, a look at whether West Africa has become uninvestable: Despite gold being among the best-performing asset classes in 2024, the gold equity exchange-traded funds (ETFs), for major precious metal producers, (GDXJ +13% and GDX +9%) did not deliver the expected leverage. Among a peer group of 17 gold mining companies, IAMGold Corp. […]
Read more »The Growing Pains of Asia’s Newest Country: East Timor
February 16th, 2025
Courtesy of the New Y ork Times, a report on East Timor which has become a stable democracy after securing independence in 2002, but its finances are precarious, and nearly half of its people live in poverty: Three decades ago, he was a scrappy campaigner roaming the world’s corridors of power with a dream to […]
Read more »ASEAN’s Tiger Economies Have Lost Their Roar
February 15th, 2025
Via Nikkei Asia, a look at how – with diverse national circumstances – Southeast Asia remains less than the sum of its parts: In the bubble years of the late 1980s, the appreciation of the Japanese yen sent a flood of investment from corporate Japan to the fast-growing economies of Southeast Asia. Matsushita, as Panasonic […]
Read more »Indonesia: The ‘OPEC’ of Nickel
February 15th, 2025
Courtesy of The Financial Times, a report on Indonesia and what it may do with its newfound power over a mineral that will be crucial for everything from prices to the future of mining investments: Just over a decade ago, Bahodopi, a remote district in eastern Indonesia, was a tangle of lush, tropical forest. There […]
Read more »Sudan Agrees To Deal For Russian Naval Base
February 15th, 2025
Courtesy of The Financial Times, a report on an agreement for a Russian naval base in Sudan: Sudan on Wednesday said it had agreed a deal for Russia to establish a naval base on the war-torn country’s Red Sea coast, marking a rare success for Moscow’s drive to expand its network of military bases in […]
Read more »Brunei: Oil in the Imperial Periphery
February 15th, 2025
Via Phenomenal World, an article on Brunei’s unlikely path to independence: The majority of the nearly two hundred sovereign states that exist today were born through decolonization following the end of the Second World War. With the colonial metropole fearing the emergence of unstable and unviable states, smaller territories were often included in larger entities […]
Read more »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.