First Republic Seized by Government; Sold to JP Morgan
The US government rode to the rescue of First Republic Bank depositors, seized the failing bank and sold it to JP Morgan Chase. It is the second largest US bank failure, and was a favourite of rich Californians from the San Francisco/Silicon Valley strip.
The Wall Street Journal said of the deal on Monday morning “… heading off a chaotic collapse that threatened to reignite the recent banking crisis.”
JPMorgan is now the largest bank in the United States. Its CEO positioned the rescue as a civic duty. “Our government invited us and others to step up, and we did,” JPMorgan Chief Executive Jamie Dimon said Monday.
Who is Building Big
There are nine giant construction projects in the world that are estimated to cost more than $100-billion. Riches from oil are funding four of them including two giants projects in Saudi Arabia: Neom City and King Abdullah Economic city.
The largest is the European Union’s Trans-European Transport Network, a system of railways, roads, shipping routes and infrastructure. There is only one in the United States: the California High-speed Rail link.
The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men
Five of the twelve on this list are Olympics and World Cup vanities.
Canadians will be proud that Montreal Mayor Jean Drapeau’s 1976 Olympic dream still ranks on the over budget chart.
NOTE: This week’s newsletter is late and maybe a little short as I was travelling.
Oil Boom Brings Starbucks to Guyana
The first Starbucks opened in Guyana this week. It was such a big deal that the president of South American country cut the ribbon at the opening.
Guyana will have the fastest-growing economy in the world this year, growing by 37.2%, according to the International Monetary Fund. The country is producing 383,000 barrels of oil a year and that will triple by 2027. Guyana has reserves estimated at 11-billion. This year alone, Guyana will earn more than $1.6-billion in oil royalties.
The latest statistics put capita income $21,900 abd it is now much higher. Per capita GDP has more than doubled since 2019. The government has spread the cash around giving citizens direct handouts.
Oil Price.com describes Guyana as “the world’s hottest frontier oil play”. It added that “Guyana is undergoing a transformative oil boom that is lifting the tiny South American country out of poverty and turning it into one of the continent’s largest oil producers.
Guyana was once called British Guyana and it is the only English-speaking country in South America. Its culture is Caribbean rather than Latino and indeed many of the workers in the oilfields come from Trinidad and Tobago, which has a long history of oil development. The country has a population of around 800,000 and at is about the same size as the state of Idaho, double the size of Canada’s three Maritime provinces and equal to the territory of the entire United Kingdom.
German Coal Surge: When Ideology Trumps Common Sense
Germany turned off its nuclear reactors. You can see when in the chart below. Germany replaced nuclear power with coal, and not just any coal but the dirtiest coal there is.
When Ideology Trumps Reading the Facts
George Orwell was a Socialist. He fought on the left wing side in the vicious Spanish Civil War. That turned him not against socialism, but against hard line Stalinists. That’s a simplistic summary, but his essays and broadcasts, most of which I have read, detail his ideas. His two greatest books, Animal Farm and 1984, are a critique of both Soviet totalitarianism and the Nazi police state. Right of centre politicians use phrases such as Orwellian and hold up copies of 1984 to mock their left of centre opponents.
Canadian Conservative leader Pierre Pollievre using Orwell’s 1984 to make a point. Orwell was the furthest thing from a conservative. He wrote this just after publishing Animal Farm:“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it”. (Orwell’s Italics)
Essay of the Week
This is the second chapter of my second novel, The Obit Man, published by Mosaic Press in 2004. Though it might seem autobiographical, it is in fact fiction, since though I wrote obituaries for The Daily Telegraph, I did that from Canada, though I visited the paper in London often. The story is based in London in 1986 and France in 1943. This is a long entry. You can let me know if I should include another one in the next little while.
2
LONDON, LATE FEBRUARY, 1986
There was no set number of obituaries the paper ran every day. Sometimes it might be just one, as long as four thousand words with a big picture. Most days it was three, with the most British subject getting the biggest art, as editors called photographs or even sketches that would go with the obit.
War heroes were big, along with offbeat artistic types: writers, sculptors, actors or just plain ne’er-do-well bohemians who had spent half their lives drinking themselves to death in Soho. It helped if they’d been to publicschool.
Brutal honesty was part of the new obituary. Even Jack was still shocked when some roué was described ‘as a womanizer and a cad.’ Not shocked in a prudish way, since he was both those things at times, but because the paper had the nerve to call a cad a cad.
Jack’s beat was Canada, the United States and Latin America, though if the Americans were halfway famous,or the Latin American artsy enough, it would be plucked from his basket. He didn’t mind. It was interesting work, and no one ever bothered him or much cared when or if he showed up, as long as he produced the copy on time. He was paid by the word, but they gave him a desk, a phone and a computer terminal, though he had better gear back at his flat.
Today’s dead man was an American baseball player, a colourful drunk who was in the Baseball Hall of Fame, not that that would mean much to British readers. But because of the war there was a British connection. Cowboy Rhett had spent two of the best years of his baseball career sitting in a B-17 while strangers shot hot metal at him. He could have wangled a dispensation and sold war bonds. That would have meant staying at home and playing a few exhibition baseball games on tour, but he’d volunteered for active duty. The baseball part would be easy for Jack. Since Englishmen, and the particular type of Englishmen who read this paper, knew nothing about baseball, he could do the baseball from memory and the stuff he scalped from the sports pages of the International Herald Tribune. A few phone calls to an American sportswriter who worked for The Gazette in Montreal should give him an anecdote no one in Europe would ever read.
The plane was where he needed the edge. The Americans loved the B-17, the Flying Fortress, and thought it the greatest bomber of the war, at least until the B-29. But Jack’s audience would disagree. While the B-17 might have had more armour and an extra gun turret, his readers would know the Lancaster carried a bigger payload and could outfly the B-17 – higher and faster.
Phone calls wouldn’t be enough. This meant a visit to his air force expert. Jack looked over to see if the obit editor, Christopher Langton, was busy. On his desk was a row of reference books, things such as British political biographies and, of course, Who’s Who and Debrett’s, the encyclopaedia of the aristocracy and a must for this newspaper. Behind him were stacks of newspapers, theirs and the competition’s, all kept in a messy sort of order the way they are in a library.
Langton was on the phone. Jack waited a minute. He knew Langton would hang up soon enough since he didn’t like long chats on the phone. Odd for a newsman.
“When do you want to run Cowboy Rhett?” asked Jack, though he guessed the answer would be sometime next week.
“Tuesday.”
“Right. I’m off to North Weald.”
At the mention of the address in the outer suburbs of Essex, Langton looked back down at what he was working on. It was a genealogy of some noble family scribbled on a sheet of paper with details cribbed from Debrett’s on things such as how the title started life. It would be translated into the story-telling prose of the long newspaper obituary later in the morning.
Jack closed what he was doing, picked up his Death Book, his nickname for the notebook he used for obituaries, then left. On the way out he pinched the first edition of a morning tabloid and last week’s Economist. One of the perks of the news biz: free newspapers.
As he was about to leave the beard-and-checked shirt caught up with him.
“Oh, there you are. Glad to have caught you.” Langton was breathing harder than usual from the rush to find Jack who wondered if there was a new policy about cadging The Economist and the Daily Mail.
“What is it?” asked Jack a bit nervous.
“Just some French fellow. Canadian French. DSO, Croix de Guerre avec palme. You can do him?” asked Langton, with the emphasis on the can, which had the effect of turning a question into an order.
“Sure.” Jack never turned down work.
“No rush. Just came through. Do the American first and I’ll have everything you need on this French-Canadian chap. Talk to me tomorrow.”
“Right. I’ll be here,” promised Jack who hadn’t planned to come in at all.
Langton handed him one slip of paper, a fax of a cryptic death notice, and turned to walk back to his office. Jack walked over to the reception desk and opened his Death Book. He borrowed some scissors and tape from the girl behind the desk and, leaving six pages for Cowboy Rhett, taped the death notice into his book. He’d think about it later.
Now he was off to see his air force expert, a man with memories of every plane flown in the last war and books to back up every memory. Without people like him, obituaries would be little more than death notices.
Before leaving, Jack had called his air force man to make sure he was in. No use making the trip past Epping for nothing. Though rural Essex, or at least the edge of rural Essex, might seem a long way from the newspaper office in the centre of London, it was only one change and fifteen stops on the Central Line. It should take forty-five minutes, thought Jack, maybe an hour if there’s a problem.
His first trip to North Weald was in 1970, to an air show. He’d been back many times since, at first to see a girl he’d met there, now always just to see Nick Mason.
“Cowboy Rhett was nothing special, and neither was the B-17,” said the retired Wing Commander, a man who had flown Spitfires at the beginning of the war. After being shot down twice, and almost bleeding to death the second time, he went to Canada as part of the Commonwealth air- training programme, putting pilots through their stuff at bleak, frozen airfields. Places with names like Rivers, Manitoba. He didn’t return to England until late1944.
Mason’s cottage was almost on top of the North Weald airfield, and although the tube stop was five minutes from his door, the place seemed part of the English countryside. Even Langton might approve. Mason was a neat little man, short with a slight build, a jockey custom made for a Spitfire or a Gloster Meteor, England’s first jet fighter that he flew in the last days of the war and into the 1950s.
“He was another pilot who arrived here in 1942 with the United States Army’s Eighth Air Force. When I say here, they couldn’t fly from here of course,” as he motioned in the direction of the North Weald airfield. “They needed room for those B-17s.”
Mason walked over to the bookshelf in his study and pulled down a big book on bombers of the Second World War, one of dozens he had on Allied fighters and bombers. He flipped through to get comparisons between the American and British bombers.
“You know they didn’t even start flying bombing raids until August of ’42.” This was said with the disdain of the Little Englander, who liked to feel the British won the war almost on their own. Jack thought without the Americans the Germans would still be in Paris, but he liked Mason and wasn’t about to argue with him. Maybe later.
The old fighter pilot thought he knew the bomb loads of the B-17 and the Lancaster, but he wanted to be sure. “Flying Fortress. Boeing’s always been top notch at marketing. I think they could carry ten thousand pounds tops. Wait a minute, there’s one version that carried seventeen thousand, even a bit more with external bomb racks. Not many of those made. At the end of the war the Lanc was carrying the grand slam. That was twenty-two thousand pounds.”
He looked in the pages for confirmation of what he already knew. His once perfect eyes now helped by half-slit glasses held by a string around his neck. His distance vision was still better than 20-20, even at 64 years old.
“The Lancaster had the same engine as the Spitfire. Four Merlins. The B-17s took a terrible pounding on the long- range missions. Flew in broad daylight, you know. At one stage they had to call them off until the P-51s got over here.” His finger moved in a dramatic flourish to the chart he knew was in there somewhere. “There it is. The numbers are right. Dangerous business, bombers, Lancs or B-17s. But the Yanks overestimated these things.Brave men flying them though. They took a terrible drubbing in those daylight raids.”
Mason closed his book. Once started, he was impossible to stop. Jack reached for it and started looking through. He took notes from what Mason was telling him, but noticed a chart that showed the B-17 had a longer range than the Lancaster. And it had more armour plating. The Lancaster was stripped down to carry a maximum bomb load.
“Now the B-25. There was an adaptation,” added Mason, as if to prove he wasn’t anti-American. “Fully armoured it was a real weapons platform, as they say these days. An incredible amount of firepower. And of course the B-29: but we never had those in Europe.”
Just then Mrs. Mason came in, carrying tea. She liked Jack, since he reminded her of home. She was a beautiful Icelandic woman from Gimli, Manitoba. Her blonde hair had turned grey but she still had the striking light blue eyes that had captivated her British pilot during the long prairie winter of 1943.
Mason kept talking but Jack stood up.
“You’re much too thin Mr. Devlin. Eat this cake and put some meat on those bones.”
“You’re too kind Mrs. Mason. If you made it I’m sure it’ll be wonderful.”
She smiled at his flirtation, even with an older woman. “So charming. It must be the French blood.” Since Jack was from Montreal, she was convinced he was French though the only French blood he had came from fights withFrench boys a few streets over.
She called her husband Nicholas. Jack noticed most women do that, call their men by their long-form name. He never let on there was any other name but Jack on his birth certificate. As Mrs. Mason left, Nick Mason started talking about bombers again.
Jack interrupted. He knew Mason well enough, so he could get away with it. And Mason knew Jack’sfather had been in Wellingtons for two years, a place where the odds were worse than for a soldier in thetrenches in the First War. “Enough with the hardware,” laughed Jack, putting up his hands as if asking for mercy from the torrent of statistics, comparisons and real war stories from this walking encyclopaedia. “Give me a bit of stuff on how American pilots would fit in, and where did he fly from?”
“Somewhere in Norfolk, according to this,” looking at the death notice and small obit Jack had brought from Cowboy’s hometown in West Virginia. “They were all over the country, of course, but this lot seemed to have been in Norfolk.”
Mason talked about how the Americans had a lot of money and how some Englishmen resented their success with the English girls. As Mason spoke Jack remembered one of his trips up there. He’d been doing a television piece and walked into a shop to get a key made. The shopkeeper snubbed him and as much as threw the key back at him.
“Thinks you’re American,” said the older cameraman he was working with. “Still angry at how many of their girls the Yanks knocked up during the war.”
Just as Jack was ready to leave, Mason started talking about the dead American pilot. “Bit of waste using someone like Rhett in a bomber. A baseball player. He was the same as a bowler in cricket, wasn’t he?”
Jack mumbled yes. “A pitcher. It’s more like rounders than cricket.”
Mason ignored him.
“Should have put him in fighters. Fellow probably had first-class eyesight. There was another baseball player, Ted Williams, I think. They had him in fighters.”
The stuff of the perfect obit. Jack shook Mason’s hand and got ready to walk back to the North Weald tube stop. It ran on a weird timetable, but Mason assured him there would be a train within half an hour.
Now came the payoff. “Could be longer. But let me run you down. We can stop in at the Fiddler’s on the way.” An excuse to get out of the house and drink. Jack suppressed a smile and thanked him for the offer of the lift.
The car was a bit ancient, a late ‘60s Rover 2000TC, quite advanced in its day. It looked as if it had been bought yesterday, except the red leather upholstery had creases and wrinkles, but then so did Mason. For a man who flew some of the fastest machines in the world in the 1940s, Mason was a danger to shipping on the road in the 1980s. He was slow, deliberate and absent-minded, all at the same time.
They managed to get to the pub, run by a caricature of an old army man, complete with a thick, white moustache, cavalry twills, a checked shirt and a brown knit tie. Jimmy was his name.
“American, are you?” Jack thought right away, another Little Englander. Better to humour him or he was infor a boring lecture. Humour him by being short and telling him what he wanted to hear.
“Yes.”
Jimmy didn’t even look up as he drew a couple of pints. “Over here on a trip?”
“You might say that,” Jack replied, though he had been there since the late 1970s.
Mason interrupted as Jack paid for the beer. “Canadian actually, Jimmy. Father was in Wellingtons during the war. Hard to tell the accents apart. Rather like Aussie and Kiwi to the untrained ear,” Mason smirking, enjoying the dig at the snobby publican. “Got to know the nuances of all four after a couple of years in Rivers,Manitoba.” A laugh from Mason, a grudging smile from Jack and a worried look from Jimmy who wasn’t sure whether or not the whole exchange had been a put-down. But it didn’t really matter. To Jimmy the fly boys weren’t the right class anyway. Just before they walked over to a table by the door, Jack snapped up a London Underground timetable sitting on the bar. It gave the local times for Ongar and North Weald. Not all trains wentto the last two stations on the Central Line and there wouldn’t be a train until around four. That meant almost an hour in the pub then an hour back to London, all the way back to his flat. Mason had told him a bit of a fib, but he didn’t mind. He’d work tonight, then finish off Cowboy Rhett by early tomorrow.
“It’s actually easier to tell Kiwi from Australian than Canadian from some Americans,” said Mason, this time with Jimmy out of earshot. “We had a few Americans in the squadron, just before and after Pearl Harbour. Chaps from Califor- nia sound just like you. And we had someone from Nebraska who trained in Rivers. Went back to the American Air Force. Killed over Ploesti in a B-24 Liberator. Long trip that.”
“Romania, wasn’t it?” Jack asked though he knew the answer. Mason seemed to sense that and plowed right on.
“Now if a B-17 was making that run they would have to cut the bomb load down to maybe 4,000 pounds. I think your dead friend Cowboy Rhett was in on one of those, according to that clipping. They always talk up anyone famous who did something brave and lived. Good for morale and recruits. Dangerous business, as you know.”
Jack took out his pen and scribbled a note about Ploesti. The conversation drifted to the Mosquito, the safest bomber the British flew. A combination of speed and altitude kept the plywood fighter-bomber out of reach of almost everything the Luftwaffe could throw at it, except maybe the Me-262s, the German jets that flew towards the end of the war.
Three pints took their toll. Jack took a leak at the pub and planned another at the station. It would be hard making it all the way back with a full bladder. Then he could always change at Mile End to the District Line and, to use Mason’s expression, ‘shed a tear’ part way home. Jack was 40 and found his bladder didn’t have the endurance it once had.
The white Rover dropped him off just a few minutes before the train arrived. Mason seemed sad to see him go and waved goodbye before heading back to his books and his view of the airfield.