Tin Prices hit High
Tin prices are up 70% this year to $34,000 a metric ton. The price is being driven by demand for solder, one of the main modern uses of tin. The solder is used on printed circuit boards and the worldwide shortage of chips means there should be a rising demand for tin. The Wall Street Journal reporting that Covid cases are up in countries that are major producers of tin -- Indonesia, Myanmar and Rwanda—and that could cut into supply. Economics 101: prices go up.
China is the biggest producer of tin and record rainfall there is hurting production.
Tin cans are not made of tin, they are made of tinplate, steel covered with a thin layer of tin. The term tin can survives because they were once all tin to preserve food. They were also soldered with lead, which poisoned some of the crew members on the Franklin Expedition. Lead soldering of cans is forbidden in most, if not all, rich countries.
Foreign investors feed Wall Street Frenzy
Stocks in New York closed at a record high after an up and down week. At one point headlines said “Biggest drop since October.”
Foreign Investors poured almost a trillion dollars into American mutual funds and exchange traded funds, according to the Wall Street Journal. Biggest number since 1992. The S&P 500 – a much better index than the Dow – is up 17% so far this year. Japanese stocks are unchanged. Shanghai composite up just 2.2%. But German stocks are up 14%.
Covid Stats from the Financial Times Weekend edition
Confirmed cases
192.5m
Deaths
4.1m
Total vaccination doses given
3.8bn
Work After Covid.
There will be no going back to the old 9-5 seven days a week model anytime soon.
Split weeks will be more like it.
The Bank of Canada says it is going to a so-called `Hybrid` model where staff is staggered, some working at home one day, in the office the next. “More employees will be allowed access over the fall, in line with federal and provincial public health guidelines. Based on current conditions, we are not anticipating full on-site staffing levels until the new year,” Chief Human Resources Officer Alexis Corbett said in an email.
Working from home is welcome news for Ottawa staff in winter. Ottawa is the coldest capital city in the world, colder than Moscow, colder than Ulan Bator.
Travel After Covid
Cruising through the photos on my I-Phone old photos made me yearn to travel.
Nuts
This house in Toronto sold for C$2.9-million. It was listed at C$2.328-million and there was a bidding war and it sold for C$667,000 above the asking price.
It is not even in one of the top neighbourhoods in Toronto. The last time it sold was in 2013 for C$1.17-million. Now it’s close to C$3-million.
Nuts.
Essay of the Week
When Jane E. Bigelow was elected the first woman mayor of London, Ontario, in 1972, her family remembers one newspaper announced to its readers that the new mayor's name was James E. Bigelow. Ms. Bigelow, who has died at the age of 92, came up against that sort of thing all the time, but she took it in her stride.
On her first few weeks on the job, a city manager came to her with a crisis. "Some of the women staff are wearing pantsuits to work. What do we do about it?" he asked.
"Leave it with me," said Ms. Bigelow. The next day she arrived at City Hall wearing a pantsuit. The issue was never raised again.
One story that did make headlines was when Ms. Bigelow refused to wear a hat during a visit by the Queen in June of 1973. Protocol officers briefed her ahead of the visit, saying the mayor must wear a hat. She never wore hats and wasn’t about to make an exception. It made news in Canada and Britain, since officials such as mayors were not supposed to thumb their noses at royal protocol. "I think the most notable thing was that my mother liked to sew, and in the photo with the Queen, she is wearing a dress she made for herself," said her daughter, Ann Bigelow.
In an interview in 2005, Ms. Bigelow said it was what many people remembered about her. “People bring it up all the time. I guess I’ll go down in history,” she said. “It was London, Ontario, at the time. That’s why it made such as fuss.”
Jane Elizabeth Dillon was born in 1928 in Toronto. Her mother, Margaret King, stayed at home; her father, Edward Dillion, was a lawyer. The family lived on Albertus Avenue in North Toronto, and young Jane went to nearby St. Clement's School, where she excelled at sports. During the summer, she worked at summer camps in Ontario and Quebec. The Bigelows spent summers at a cottage on Toronto Island and young Jane would take the ferry to go to school. The family spent time at a one-room cabin on Talon Lake near North Bay. "My grandfather built it during the Second World War because he was worried Toronto might be bombed," said Ann Bigelow.
Jane Dillon took a degree in Physical Education at the University of Toronto, graduating in 1950, and worked for several years as a high school teacher. She married Charles Bigelow, who was a biochemist finishing his doctorate. They moved to Denmark in 1958 where Mr. Bigelow worked at the Carlsberg Institute. Their first child, Ann, was born there.
Before leaving for Denmark, Ms. Bigelow cashed out her pension and received $2,000, which she spent on modern, teak furniture. The Danish furniture turned out to be a good investment. It moved with the family; in later life, she sold just the dining room set for $5,000.
The next posting was to the Sloane Kettering Institute. In 1960 the family moved to New York City, where their second child, David, was born. In New York, Ms. Bigelow worked for a while as a high school teacher. Their final out-of-country posting was in Tallahassee, Florida. It was there that the racism of the south shocked them. "I remember my parents telling me that my father couldn't drive our black cleaning lady home because it wasn't safe for either of them to be in the car together," said David Bigelow. Ms. Bigelow and her husband became lifelong supporters of liberal causes and went to the United States to help work on one presidential election campaign.
After Florida, the family returned to Canada, and Charles Bigelow became a professor at the University of Western Ontario. He was president of the union at the University and ran unsuccessfully for the provincial NDP. Jane Bigelow also became involved with the New Democratic Party, serving as its secretary at one stage. The couple was deeply involved in politics. When David Lewis, the then leader of the federal NDP came to town, young David Bigelow remembers sleeping on the couch so Mr. Lewis could use his bed.
For a while, Jane Bigelow worked on earning a Master's degree in Sociology. Her children remember that to concentrate, she would leave the house and study in their parked car.
Ms. Bigelow was elected to the London Board of Control in the late 1960s. In one photo she is the only woman surrounded by a group of men in suits. When the mayor stepped down for health reasons in 1972, she was narrowly chosen to be the interim mayor. She won the city-wide election three months later. Although she was the first woman mayor of London, she was not the first woman mayor of a large Canadian city. That would be Charlotte Whitton, who was elected mayor of Ottawa in 1951.
Though it was only 49 years ago, the stereotyping and sexism of the day seem even farther away. Reporters followed her to the grocery store to photograph her shopping. At the time, Ms. Bigelow was divorced, and reporters wondered how she would have time to feed her children. Her daughter Ann remembers her mother's retort: "It's amazing what you can do with a jar of frozen spaghetti sauce."
It was front-page news when the London Club, then all-male, invited her to speak, as they did for every new mayor. She accepted. Newspapers snidely called her `Jane of Arc.' It didn't bother her.
At the local television station, the interviewer referred to Ms. Bigelow's 13-year-old son David, who had fashionable long hair, as her daughter. Her children did not enjoy their mother's local fame.
"We both hated it. I felt like I lost my identity," said Ann Bigelow, a CPA who taught accounting at Western. "Walking down the halls at high school people would call me mayor. In Grade 12, one guy whose father planned to run against my mother body checked me into the lockers."
Her son David remembers their mother asked them to stay out of trouble. "Our goal was not to do anything that would get us on the front page of the Globe and Mail," said David, a professor at Vancouver Island University. "It was the 1970s. People's mothers weren't supposed to be mayor."
Jane Bigelow lost the 1978 election and later won one more term on the Board of Control. She spent many years working for the federal government in Hamilton and London, helping to settle immigrants.
"My mother believed that Canada needed new immigrants to make the country stronger," said her daughter Anne. Jane Bigelow also worked with women’s groups such as local women’s centre and the sexual assault centre among others. She was on the board of Anova, a woman’s shelter in London, Ontario. She left them a significant amount of money in her will.
One of Ms. Bigelow's achievements as mayor was to expand parks, walking, and bicycle paths as well as promote libraries, museums, and festivals. She was an avid bicyclist and would often bike with her poodle, Figgy, in the carrier. On her 90th birthday, the City of London named part of its trail system the Jane Bigelow Parkway. She received an honorary doctorate from the University of Western Ontario.
Jane Elizabeth Bigelow was born on June 9, 1928, in Toronto. She died in London, Ontario on June 1, 2021, after complications from a fall. Her daughter Ann and son David survive her, as does her brother David and two grandchildren.