[Barrick Gold’s] Peter Munk: in conversation – by Kenneth Whyte – Maclean’s Magazine – July 27, 2011

Maclean’s is the largest circulation weekly news magazine in Canada, reporting on Canadian issues such as politics, pop culture, and current events.

On immigrant dreams, the importance of failure and why the future belongs to Canada

Peter Munk, the founder and chair of Barrick Gold, the world’s biggest gold miner, found a land of opportunity when he arrived in Canada as a teenager after he fled Nazi-occupied Hungary. But the 83-year-old businessman is convinced the country’s brightest days may still lie ahead. As the appetite for raw materials skyrockets in China, India and other developing countries, he argues that Canada has a rare, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to establish itself as the world’s next big financial sector, rivalling the dominance of London and New York.

Q: Let’s talk first about your earliest impressions of Canada as an immigrant boy.

A: That day I arrived, it was a miserable, rainy day in early March ’48. It was like, terra incognita, like going to Mars. I know it sounds moronic.

Q: No. It doesn’t.

A: I arrived in Toronto, and I tried to talk to my Uncle Nick in Hungarian, I tried to talk to him in German. The last time I saw him was in 1938 when Grandfather sent him to Canada as a General Motors agent. He was my father’s young brother. When I arrived, Uncle Nick was a part-owner of the Ajax manufactory. He said, “We don’t speak here Hungarian. This is Canada, we speak English.” I took it in school and I never practised except for the five days in England when Dad shoved me on that boat in Liverpool.

Q: Was the idea that you’d come and do a year of high school and then go to university?

A: It was Grade 13, and number one, I never in my life could conceive, never heard, never read, about mixed-sex schools. In Hungary and Switzerland there were girls’ school, and if a guy went near a girls’ school he was in danger to be dismissed, okay?

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Heavy metals [aluminum] – by Pratima Desai, Clare Baldwin, Susan Thomas and Melanie Burton (Reuters-National Post – July 29, 2011)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Goldman Sachs turns aluminum and warehouses into money machine

In a rundown patch of Detroit, enclosed by a cyclone fence and barbed wire, stands an unremarkable warehouse that investment bank Goldman Sachs has transformed into a money-making machine.

The derelict neighbourhood off Michigan Avenue is a sharp contrast to Goldman’s bustling skyscraper headquarters near Wall Street, but the two operations share one important element: management by the bank’s savvy financial professionals.

A string of warehouses in Detroit, most of them operated by Goldman, has stockpiled more than a million tonnes of the industrial metal aluminum, about a quarter of global reported inventories. Simply storing all that metal generates tens of millions of dollars in rental revenues for Goldman every year.

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