Bryan Matthews

Equitrans Midstream expands in Marcellus and Utica. EQM Midstream Partners will buy a 60 percent stake in Eureka Midstream Holdings and 100 percent of Hornet Midstream Holdings. EQM will pay $860 million cash and assume $170 million debt in the $1.03 billion deal.     Gas companies are investing seriously in pipeline infrastructure for the Utica and Marcellus shale basins. A recent resurgence in drilling activity gave rise to tight channel capacity.      Eureka Midstream is a 190-mile natural-gas gathering header pipeline system in Ohio and West Virginia servicing both dry Utica and wet Marcellus production. Hornet Midstream is a 15-mile high-pressure gathering system in West Virginia that connects to the Eureka system. Long-term contracts underpin both systems.      Thomas Karam of EQM said: ‘This bolt-on acquisition, within our footprint, leverages our existing assets and core operating compete...

Brookfield buys Oaktree .      Brookfield Asset Management will buy a 62 percent stake in Oaktree Capital Group for $4.7 billion. Oaktree shareholders will own the residual 38 percent of the firm.      Brookfield presently focuses on private equity, real estate, infrastructure, and renewable power. Notable properties are London’s Canary Wharf, Manhattan West, the new complex at Hudson Yards, and Brookfield Place, near Wall Street.       This deal allows Brookfield to diversify its offerings into credit, which makes up 70 percent of Oaktree’s assets under management. The firms together will have about $475 billion of assets under management. Bruce Flatt of Brookfield said: ‘This transaction enables us to broaden our product offering to include one of the finest credit platforms in the world, which has a value-driven, contrarian investment style, consistent with ours. There will be no change to either of...

Blackstone invests in Carrix.     Funds associated with Blackstone Infrastructure Partners invested in Carrix, the biggest marine terminal operator in the U.S. and the Americas.      Carrix is the parent company of SSA Marine with collective operations at over 250 port and rail locations worldwide.  This includes 16 container terminals in Long Beach, Oakland, Seattle, Tacoma, Panama, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, and Vietnam.     Jon Hemingway of Carrix said: ‘We are happy that BIP has invested in Carrix and will be working with us to continue our on-going growth and development.  Along with its affiliates, BIP brings a network of highly skilled and experienced people, global relationships, ability in a diverse array of businesses, and myriad capabilities to apply.  When combined with our experience in the port industry and infrastructure development, we have broadened what our shareholders and directors can do to support Carrix an...

The well-connected owned an array of clothes.  Costume was dictated by occasion, season, and time of day.  Especially tough were country house weekends.  Open saloons were taking the place of horse-drawn coaches.  The most avant-garde sped to their rural venues hidden in baggy dust coats, protective bonnets, veils, and goggles.  Their trunks bulged with essentials for a variety of indoor and outdoor pursuits.  Riding gave women a chance to parade their corseted figures in tailored habits.  Golfing, shooting, skating, tennis, croquet, mountaineering, archery, and bathing all required specific dress.  English designers exploited their reputation for high-quality tailor-made costumes and activity wear.  The best came from Creed, Redfern, and Burberry.     Tea gowns were essential to gracious living.  Fashion magazines carried regular reviews of the latest decorative designs and how to wear them.  Edwardian fiction and biog...

All over Europe and the US, department stores, mainly begun in the nineteenth century, came into their own. These retail colossi exerted an immense influence on fashion. Most had couture and tailoring ateliers as well as ready-to-wear sections. Patrons in London were offered ease and useful service by the likes of Harrods, Swan & Edgar, Debenham & Freebody , and from 1909, Selfridges – the Oxford Street emporium established by the American-born businessman Gordon Selfridge. Paris had its grands magasins , including Galeries Lafayette, Au Printemps , and La Samaritaine . In the US there were Bergdorf Goodman, Henri Bendel, and from 1907, Neiman Marcus. Most stores also turned out mail-order catalogs and accessories on approval. The chic look of the day was spread via postcards and cigarette cards. These touched a wide audience and cut across classes. As well as such male-orientated topics as Boer War generals, football club colors, and baseball players, ciga...

As the country lived off its harvests, and the cities off the surplus, it was practical for a town to get its supplies from within a reaching distance.  ‘From its own possessions’, as a council-meeting in Bologna advised in 1305.  This provisioning from within a radius of twenty or thirty kilometers dodged the difficulties of transport and the always risky recourse to far-off suppliers.  It worked all the better because towns almost everywhere controlled the nearby rural areas.  In France until Turgot and the Flour War, even until the Revolution, peasants were obligated to sell their grain at the market of the nearby town.  During the troubles of the summer famine of 1789, rioters knew where to lay their hands on those grain merchants believed to be hoarders.  Everybody knew them.  This was probably true all over Europe.  For instance, there was no place in eighteenth-century Germany without a measure against usurers, grain hoarders, Getreidewuche...

Wheat had other and more significant associates.  Barley, for example, which was used to feed horses in the south.  ‘No barley harvest, no war’, was said in the sixteenth century and later, of the long Hungarian frontier where battles between Turks and Christians were unthinkable without cavalry.  Toward the north, hard grains gave way to soft grains, barley to oats, and more especially rye, which came late to the north.  Most likely not before the great invasions of the fifth century.  After this, it seems to have become well-known and spread there at the same time as triennial rotation.  Ships from the Baltic, soon drawn farther and farther from home by hungry Europe, carried as much rye as wheat.  First, they came as far as the North Sea and the Channel, then to the Iberian ports on the Atlantic and finally, on a grand scale at the time of the crisis of 1590, as far as the Mediterranean.  All these cereals were used to make bread, even in the e...