Where money was made; Richest US Zip Codes and Twilight of the Luxury Liner.
January 8, 2023 Volume 4 # 34
Where Money Was Made For the Last 10 Years
Try studying this chart and figuring out what’s coming next. Good Luck. Large caps, big companies that are stock market giants, did the best in the last decade.
EM stands for Emerging Markets; REITs are Real Estate Investment Trusts; Comdty is for Commodities, like nickel and gold; TIPS is an acronym for Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, issued by the US Government with the idea they protect you from inflation. Until I saw this chart I had never heard of them before. And with good reason, judging by their performance.
And the Largest of The Large Caps
Emerging Markets
Or in some cases Emerged markets. But the BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa are adding Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE, Iran and Ethiopia in 2024
The acronym will get a bit unruly. But the question is can they push aside the dominance of the US dollar, which has ruled in International trade since 1945.
CNN-isation of the News
Imagine the Maine shooting almost getting as many hits as Gaza. And three American hurricanes. There are a lot more serious things happening in the world but the cable news networks focus on one thing hour after hour and that drives people to Google the story.
Tesla Range Cut As BYD Moves to # 1
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) gives the range on electric cars. Most people thought they were overly generous and this week the EPA downgraded the range on all Tesla models. For example the range on the best selling Y went from 330 miles to 310. The EPA said the new numbers reflect “real world performance”.
Tesla Models from the left: S, 3, X and Y
Chinse EV Outsells Tesla
BYD says it turned out 3-million electric vehicles last year. Tesla made 1.84-million.
The BYD range, with prices in Euros. Will China conquer the EV market like Japan did in the regular car market in the 1980s? Tesla has cut prices to match the Chinese.
Richest Zip Codes in the United States
Everyone knows 90210 from the TV program of the same name. Beverly Hills.
But where on earth is Atherton? See answer below.
Atherton is a suburb of San Francisco, a place of gated mansions with no sidewalks, no retail shops, no restaurants and no grocery stores. The average house price is $7.5-million, according to Forbes. Nimby? The residents turned down a 130 unit housing development and voted against Caltrain, the California high speed rail plan.
Luxury Liner, 40 Tons of Steel
Title of an Emmylou Harris song but it referred to a tractor trailer not one of these.
This is Luxury Liner Row in New York City in the late 1960s. From the top we have Greek Lines QUEEN ANNA MARIA docked at Pier 97 while Canadian Pacific’s EMPRESS OF CANADA is just docking at the same pier. Pier 90 has Italy’s LEONARDO DA VINCI while at Pier 88 is the French Line’s FRANCE. Pier 86 is home for the US Lines UNITED STATES as well as the Incres Line’s VICTORIA and two Home Line liners, the OCEANIC and HOMERIC are both berthed at Pier 84.
This would be the last Christmas cruise for the UNITED STATES as she would be withdrawn from service in November of 1969. Ditto for the EMPRESS of CANADA. I went to the news conference where CP Ships announced its retirement. What I remember most is falling in love with CP’s beautiful public relations woman. Alas, unrequited love, though I did try.
The Empire State Building was Built in One Year and 45 days.
But the Daily Telegraph points out that a simple pedestrian bridge on the line from London to Cornwall has taken more than 10 years to finish. “…a case study in British inefficiency” moans the Telegraph.
Construction comparison
Empire State Building
Cost: £9.5 million (£500m allowing for inflation)
Construction dates: March 17, 1930 - April 11, 1931
Height: 1,454ft (443.2 metres)
Floors: 102
Location: 350 Fifth Avenue, New York
Main contractor: Starrett Brothers and Eken
Theale station footbridge
Cost: £9.5 million (including improvement works to car park and ticket office)
Construction dates: January 2023 - spring 2024 (estimated)
Height: 27ft (8.2 metres)
Floors: One
Location: Theale railway station, Berkshire
Main contractor: AmcoGiffen
Another Car I Should Never Have Sold
I owned a 1965 Porsche 356 exactly like this one. It is in drivable, not show condition, much like mine which I sold for C$12,000. This bid on this one is US$71,000.
The Spartan interior
A speedometer, a tachometer, a temperature gauge and that’s it. No gas gauge. When you run out, the engine coughs and you flick a switch to the reserve tank. It wasn’t that fast but it hugged the road so well it was incredible fun.
Essay of the Week
An obituary I wrote that ran in Saturday’s Globe and Mail.
John Godfrey was a true Renaissance man. His accomplishments, in no particular order, included being the editor of the Financial Post; a history professor at Dalhousie University; president of the University of King’s College, in Halifax, where he started its Journalism program; a member of Parliament, elected five times; a cabinet minister; a man who went on canoe trips in the remote north; and a writer and advocate for his favourite causes, which in recent years related to climate change.
Mr. Godfrey died on Dec. 18, a day before his 81st birthday. He was in many ways a textbook example of the Laurentian elite, but he wasn’t concerned with social status; he had learned about and abandoned all that by the time he was out of his teens, and he didn’t care much about material riches.
“When I met him, he was driving a Volkswagen and was editor of the Financial Post,” his wife, Trish Bongard Godfrey, said. The two met on a ski hill.
John Ferguson Godfrey was born in Toronto on Dec. 19, 1942, to Mary (née Ferguson) Godfrey and his namesake father, a prominent lawyer, staunch Liberal and the party’s chief fundraiser. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau named the elder Mr. Godfrey a senator in 1973. Mary raised their four children and was involved in charities, including the Canadian Opera Company, and running her busy household.
“She entertained a lot; she really created a home away from home for a lot of people especially a group of extremely elegant Hungarians who came out in the 1950s,” Ms. Bongard Godfrey said. “Of her day, she did the volunteer work but she could have run a corporation; she was a formidable personality and extremely organized.”
The family grew up in Rosedale, which was then a mixture of private single-family houses and others that were broken up into apartments and rooming houses. Young John went to Rosedale Public School, an eight-minute walk from the family home on Elm Avenue, and then Upper Canada College.
He and a friend started a newspaper at UCC, and young Conrad Black, one grade lower, contributed articles. He also met a number of foreign students at the school. John became fascinated with languages, especially French.
He graduated from Grade 13 at Neuchâtel Junior College, in Switzerland, where he perfected his French and became a true francophile.
At the University of Toronto, he studied French history and met Margaret MacMillan, the historian, whom he also knew later at Oxford. “He was unusual in his time because he spoke French, which a lot of anglophones didn’t; he was fascinated by France,” Ms. MacMillan said in a telephone interview from Oxford.
Mr. Godfrey and Ms. MacMillan were debating partners at U of T. “We used to go down to the University of Pittsburgh to a big tournament there. The Canadian style was very good for him because the Canadian style was based on Parliament and the American style was based on Congress and Senate hearings, so the Americans were very organized and had lots of filing cards in those days and we tended to be a bit more freewheeling and debated a bit more in the parliamentary manner and John was very good at that. He usually wore gowns and was quite flamboyant.”
Mr. Godfrey completed his master’s and PhD at Oxford, while also teaching European history at Dalhousie starting in 1970.
“He did his doctoral thesis on a French minister in the First World War, Étienne Clémentel, the Minister of Reconstruction at the end of the war. John was extremely good at finding things and he found the [Clémentel] family and discovered that they had a box full of papers and John became friends with them all.”
The thesis was published as a book: Capitalism at War: Industrial Policy and Bureaucracy in France, 1914-1918.
He was an outgoing and popular lecturer at Dalhousie and with a colleague, David Crook, invented a game for students with a points system that rewarded them for attending lectures.
He was named president of King’s College in 1977, when he was just 34, and he continued to teach. During his time at King’s College he founded its highly regarded School of Journalism.
Meanwhile, Mr. Godfrey contributed opinion pieces to the Financial Post and also made suggestions on improving the paper. When there was an opening for editor, publisher Neville Nankivell went to Halifax and hired Mr. Godfrey straight away.
“He had been contributing think pieces on global issues and he had good ideas for improving the paper,” Mr. Nankivell said. When Mr. Godfrey started in June of 1987, the Financial Post was a weekly broadsheet, but Maclean-Hunter sold it to the Toronto Sun months later and there were plans to convert it to a daily tabloid.
Mr. Godfrey had to hire 34 journalists. The Financial Post went daily on Feb. 1, 1988. The two men remained close after Mr. Godfrey left the paper in 1991.
“John was one of the most intelligent and decent people I have ever known,” said Mr. Nankivell, who spoke to Mr. Godfrey the night before he died.
After the Financial Post, Mr. Godfrey was hired by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. His job there as vice-president involved fundraising and administration as well as taking complex papers written by the institute and translating them into articles laypeople could understand.
As a bilingual man with a public profile as the editor of a serious business newspaper, Mr. Godfrey made an ideal candidate for the federal Liberal Party. He won the nomination for the riding of Don Valley West and was elected in 1993. It was one of Canada’s most dramatic federal elections, with Jean Chrétien winning his first term and the Progressive Conservative Party under Kim Campbell reduced from 156 seats to just two. With so many Liberals elected in Toronto, Mr. Godfrey had to wait until Paul Martin was prime minister before he was named to the cabinet in 2004 as Minister of State for Infrastructure and Communities, a portfolio he held until 2006.
In his memoir, Hell or High Water: My Life in and out of Politics, Mr. Martin described his appointment of Mr. Godfrey as “inspired,” writing: “John quickly recognized that the most effective way forward was to embrace the variety and complexity of our urban life. Instead of developing a single rigid national mould and then trying to cram each particular municipality into it, he decided to go after the provinces one by one, with the aim of signing three-way deals involving the city, the province and our government.” His strategy was highly successful.
Mr. Godfrey served as parliamentary secretary to the minister responsible for the Francophonie, chair of the National Children’s Agenda Caucus Committee, and chair of the Standing Committee on Children and Youth at Risk.
He served under four Liberal leaders, and in opposition he was the critic on environmental issues.
After leaving politics in 2008, the francophile Mr. Godfrey became the head of the Toronto French School, a private institution that, as its name implies, teaches in French. Mr. Godfrey transformed the school during his six-year tenure, including starting an International Baccalaureate Program.
He subsequently became Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne’s special adviser on climate change.
When Mr. Godfrey was invested as a member of the Order of Canada in 2019, the citation lauded him for his “broad and lasting contributions to public life.”
In semi-retirement Mr. Godfrey continued to write about public policy, in recent years concentrating on climate change. In December of 2021 he wrote that flooding in British Columbia should be a warning to other parts of the country.
“Let the catastrophic events of the past month in B.C. be a lesson for Ontario,” he wrote in The Globe and Mail. “We can’t be prepared for climate change if we don’t know what’s coming. It’s high time we found out.”
Mr. Godfrey was a voracious reader, and he had a vast library as well as a collection of music. He and his wife had a property in Upper Kingsburg, N.S.
He belonged to several groups aligned with his wide-ranging interests, including history, the arts and justice issues, according to Ms. Bongard Godfrey. “Even until his last few years he was involved in chairing the refugee-sponsorship committee at our church, Christ Church Deer Park. He was extremely interested in climate-change policy and adaptation. All of those things really worried him.”
When Mr. Godfrey died, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in a statement, “His dedication to serving Canadians will continue to be an inspiration to me and many others.”
Though he had been ill for a few years, Mr. Godfrey stayed physically active, bicycling until last spring when he suffered an injury. He leaves his wife, Trish; their son Ian; his sisters, Anne and Sally; and his sister-in-law, Susan Harrington. His brother, Stephen, predeceased him.