More evidence for Craig Murray’s thesis that there’s good money in death:
When news hit of [Jonas] Savimbi’s death, investors dumped their shares in mining companies with Angolan operations. In a paper forthcoming in the American Economic Review,
economists Massimo Guidolin and Eliana La Ferrara show that these
companies’ stock prices fell by an average of 12 percent within a
matter of days. Why was peace bad for the diamond business? Guidolin
and La Ferrara argue that the mining companies took a beating from
investors because the fortunes they’d made from Angola’s diamond mines
relied on the treacherous conditions created by civil war. (Slate)
The article alludes to Executive Outcomes’ intervention in Angola, a key moment in the development of the modern private military industry. Tony Buckingham, the man who recruited EO, would later appoint Tim Spicer as the head of Sandline.
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