Roy Hill gets US government cash

Funny how the world works. From Bloomie:

The board of the U.S. Export-Import Bank, an independent federal lending agency, gave preliminary approval for $694 million in financing for billionaire Gina Rinehart’s Roy Hill iron ore project in Australia.

The vote by the lender’s board today will support the purchase of mining equipment from U.S. companies including Caterpillar Inc. and General Electric Co. (GE), Daniel Reilly, a bank spokesman, said in an e-mailed statement.

To me, the market’s failure to support the debt raising alone indicates the fundamentally questionable metrics of the project. But hey, gotta sell those locos.

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About the author

David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.