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Professor of the history of art School of Oriental and African Studies London The Bugatti of bogs SIR – You referred to the excellent toilets being produced in Japan as the “Lamborghini of lavatories” and the “Cadillac of commodes” (Face value, July 25th). In the spirit of alliteration, might I also suggest the “Jaguar of johns” and the “Lexus of loos”? Sanjiv Mehta Montreal * Letter appears online only Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved. -19-
Latin American geopolitics The dragon in the backyard Aug 13th 2009 From The Economist print edition Latin America is tilting towards China, Iran and the global “south”—and away from the United States EPA IF ALL goes to plan, by 2012 the first shipments of copper from Toromocho, a mine in the Peruvian Andes, will be sent by train and truck to a new $70m wharf in the port of Callao. From there, they will be shipped across the Pacific to China. The mine is being developed at a cost of $2.2 billion by Chinalco, a Chinese metals giant. Both it and the wharf will be the most visible symbols of the burgeoning trade and investment that are fast turning China into a leading economic partner for Peru and many other Latin American countries. In the first six months of this year China became Brazil’s biggest single export market for the first time (partly because Brazil’s manufacturing exports fell sharply in the recession). During two days of talks in Beijing in May between Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao (pictured above), an agreement was signed under which the China Development Bank and Sinopec, a Chinese oil company, will lend Brazil’s state-controlled oil company, Petrobras, $10 billion in return for up to 200,000 barrels a day (b/d) of crude oil for ten years from the country’s new deep-sea fields. Weeks earlier China offered Argentina a currency-swap arrangement involving use of yuan worth $10 billion, and lent cash-strapped Jamaica $138m to enable it to stave off a debt default. Chinese companies have bought stakes in oilfields in Ecuador and Venezuela, and are talking of building a refinery in Costa Rica. This week China National Petroleum Corporation and CNOOC, another oil firm, were reported to have bid at least $17 billion for the 84% stake in YPF, Argentina’s biggest oil company, held by Spain’s Repsol. It is not just China that is taking a much bigger interest in Latin America. So too, in different ways, are India, Russia and Iran. These developments are prompting some to declare the end of the Monroe Doctrine—America’s traditional insistence, voiced by President James Monroe in 1823, that any meddling by outsiders in its hemisphere is “dangerous to our peace and safety”. Never mind that Yanqui dominance has always been disputed by Latin American nationalists as well as by Europe, and never mind that the United States (and Europe) are still far bigger traders and investors in Latin America as a whole than China, let alone India or Russia (see chart 1). What is clear is that there are new and potentially powerful actors in the region. -20-
Page 2 and 3: Search Requires subscription Econom
Page 4 and 5: Politics this week Aug 13th 2009 Fr
Page 6 and 7: Business this week Aug 13th 2009 Fr
Page 8 and 9: KAL's cartoon Aug 13th 2009 From Th
Page 10 and 11: Asia’s rebound has several causes
Page 12 and 13: democratic region. But Brazil’s l
Page 14 and 15: World trade and commercial aircraft
Page 16 and 17: Galileo, four centuries on As impor
Page 18 and 19: Correction: America's sex laws Aug
Page 20 and 21: SIR - You mentioned the slaughter d
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Page 34 and 35: Drought in Texas Not a cloud Aug 13
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Page 38 and 39: twice the national average. But it
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Page 42 and 43: Energy v environment in Canada Bomb
Page 44 and 45: further sanctions. Yet it is doubtf
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colluded with the Russian patriarch
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Prospects for recovery Mervyn's rea
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Conservatives will be fighting over
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advanced to scale down much. If the
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Scotland's capital and recession Pa
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Edinburgh festivals Fringe-onomics
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Bagehot Love in the time of swine f
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Correction: Teaching in Britain Aug
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Their aim is more modest. It was sp
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At a review conference next year, s
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All this would not matter much, wer
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with state aid. In an average year
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Mauro Cutrufo, Rome’s head of tou
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Online auctions Mind the pennies Au
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hire in anticipation; they will wai
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Face value Top of his game Aug 13th
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Emerging Asian economies On the reb
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y 70%. One reason why Asia’s emer
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industries with subsidies and under
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Of the three firms, AIG represents
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Assessing quantitative easing Muzzl
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All these rules failed and the sche
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Retail bonds in Europe Small fry wa
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A current-account surplus that has
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politicians still seem fixated by e
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In an influential early example of
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Thinking space Another way to encou
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Detecting habitable new worlds The
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The history of science Kepler's wor
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Engels (whose name resembles the wo
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prose, having gone from Uighur to G
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anks to hold more capital, the flow
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Football and economics Game for gee
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There are two intellectual bugbears
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she continued to lurk, roiling the
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Output, prices and jobs Aug 13th 20
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The Economist commodity-price index
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Trade, exchange rates, budget balan
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Markets Aug 13th 2009 From The Econ
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Office vacancy rates Aug 13th 2009
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