Karratha, Western Australia - Wikicommons

today, which was odd because my “news radar,” doesn’t usually sound for real estate related content.

The article describes a interesting catch 22 which has developed in the North Western State of Karratha in Australia.  This region which is home to 62% of Australia’s mineral production, 75% of its natural gas and 64% of its crude oil is experiencing a massive boom.  The region is also known as one of the most inhospitable places in the world to live.

The state is gigantic by most standards (4x the size of France), but is only home to around 15,000 official full time residents.  The rest are known as “fly in, fly outs.”  Most work in a commodity related industries, and most of the production goes to feeding China’s growth.

The result has been:

• Housing shortages because there simply aren’t enough workers to build them
• Massive surge in housing prices, on a scale not seen in any other part of Australia
• Problems attracting workers and people to work in related services because salaries are too low to support living there

We really all do live in a inter-connected world.  I doubt the residents of this Australian state would have predicted 20 years ago that China’s boom would be their heart ache as they struggle to afford to keep their homes…

Click here to read the article from Bloomberg.

The company said it will exercise the warrants from Sept. 27 to Oct. 8. Jiangxi Copper and partner China Minmetals Nonferrous Metals Co. bought Northern Peru Copper Corp. for C$455 million ($430 million) to develop the Galeno copper and gold deposit in Peru.

The project, in which Jiangxi Copper owns a 40 percent stake, is scheduled to produce 200,000 metric tons of copper from 2012, the company said.

Click here to read the complete article from Bloomberg News

Michael Kurtz, China strategist at Macquarie Securities, believes risk tolerance is back on the table in China. He tells CNBC‘s Bernard Lo that the biggest value in the mainland markets can be found in the cyclical stocks and banks.

“There are now massive trade connections within the emerging markets and they’re becoming increasingly important,” said King in a telephone interview. “It means in one sense the emerging world is protected from the worst ravages of the developed world.”

Shenzen-based Huawei Technologies Co., its biggest maker of phone equipment, had orders of $1.7 billion from India in 2008 and said in January that it will invest $500 million in its research center in Bangalore.

China Mobile Ltd. of Hong Kong, the world’s biggest phone carrier, is “interested in doing business in Africa,” where it can boost services in rural areas, Chairman Wang Jianzhou said in a June 26 interview.

Vale in 2009 acquired stakes in three copper projects, in Zambia, Africa’s largest producer of the metal, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In April this year, the company agreed to pay $2.5 billion for iron ore deposits in Guinea, including assets the country confiscated from the Rio Tinto Group.

There is still scope for ties to strengthen. In a study released last week, the Washington-based Inter-American Development Bank concluded “massive bilateral trade” could develop between Latin America and India if tariffs are cut.

Click here to access the complete article from Bloomberg

Click here to access the full article direct from SeekingAlpha.

Travel to any country in Latin America and you will see the visible hand of China at work: a computer manufacturing plant in Mexico, a copper mine in Peru, a football stadium in Costa Rica. In the year 2007, the thought of China in Latin America would have appeared, at best, improbable. But in a three-year stretch, China signed free trade agreements with Chile, Peru and Costa Rica, inked billions of dollars worth of deals in oil and mining projects throughout the region, and supplanted the US as Brazil’s biggest trading partner. Once almost unseen in Latin America, China’s bilateral trade has risen from $12bn in 2000 to well over $150bn today.

Given the importance of its new Asian friend, Latin Americans are rolling out the red carpets to Chinese business delegations and jumping on planes not only to Beijing but also to Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Tianjin.

Rationale Behind Chinese Investments in Latin America [...]

Please visit SeekingAlpha to read the full article

The aim is to expand the company’s Tintaya Copper mine which is roughly 10km away, adding 60,000 tons of copper to annual production (a 60% increase).

Read more about this development in this article published by The Mining Journal

In line with China’s outbound investment strategies in Africa and Asia, China is now planning to create a $5 billion usd investment fund for Latin American investments.

The funds target investments will include, infrastructure (probably to help the Chinese get commodities out), agriculture, mining and energy.

Read more in Spanish from Argentinean DERF Agencia de Noticias.

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This video is a bit dated, but no less offers a concise perspective on Chinese gold demand. [AlJazeeraEnglish]