Jun

23

"Widened Suez Canal to Open in August"

This is the first significant expansion of the canal's carrying capacity in its 145 year history.

Paolo Pezzutti writes:

The Panama Canal is also expanding. The size of ships has increased. They need important changes also to port infrastructure.

"The Panama Canal expansion project (also called the Third Set of Locks Project) is intended to double the capacity of the Panama Canal by 2016 by creating a new lane of traffic and allowing more and larger ships to transit."

anonymous writes:

This latest development is positive for Israeli stocks. The project was underwritten by Egyptian citizens and they are making a bet on the absence of events that will threaten the revenue from the widened canal like and Egyptian attack on Israel or a nuclear bomb exploding in the region. And the fact the Sisi's government decided to undertake it and declared it "military led" is a concrete (no pun intended) sign that their rhetoric of being business-oriented (as opposed to say oriented to destroy Israel).

anonymous writes:

Egypt is a military dictatorship, as such there is of course no "free will" exercised by "the people" of Egypt, but it's certainly a polity. Usually when a dictatorship wants to create an investment by someone other than the core clique it has two choices: coercion or guarantees of repayment of questionable quality. After all, they can change their mind at any time and all the guarantees will be gone with the wind. So observing a non-coercive investment process in a dictatorship is useful to estimate the confidence in the dictatorship by either foreign or local investors. Often large foreign investors have substantially more leverage since they can threaten a military or political retaliation via their own government. In this case, Egyptian citizens, of their own free will, trusted the military to repay them by buying the investment certificates that sold faster than expected. While this is certainly no example of Western property rights, this means that some relatively savvy citizens in a very impoverished country (thus no money to waste) trust their leaders. This is a useful datapoint in evaluating investment and other stability-related prospects in that part of the world.

Gordon Haave writes: 

What everyone is missing because (per our discussion last week) the watch and read US propaganda media is that last week the Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, The Saudi defense minister, the Saudi foreign minister, and more importantly the Saudi Oil Minister met in Russia and inked 6 new deals including defense, nuclear, and energy deals with a goal towards a "petroleum alliance".

But hey, an Al Jazeera columnist was once quoted as saying something he shouldn't have 15 years ago, so by all means keep reading US media.

Gary Rogan writes: 

Gordon, as the likely target of the last comment, let me respond. While this bit of news from All Jazz TV is valuable in it's own right (and most certainly no propaganda) and is likely to have major worldwide implication from the war in Syria, to Russia supplying Iran, to Israel, to the Saudi relationship with the US, the price of oil, Egypt, and more specifically Suez Canal, it is unlikely to have had an impact on why the Suez canal project was started many months ago. If it did, the world is even more convoluted than I could ever imagine.


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1 Comment so far

  1. Jonah Jackstadt on April 1, 2016 4:13 am

    I may be wrong but shouldn’t the inequality be y

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