Stranded Hotel in Australia Emblem of Mining Bust: Commodities
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A prefabricated six-story hotel, once destined to house BHP Billiton Ltd. workers, is sitting in 126 boxes stranded on the Melbourne city docks. The stalled project is a sign of the deepening global slowdown in mining.
The contents were to have been assembled 1,990 miles away at Port Hedland, where BHP planned to use the hotel as temporary housing for its estimated $22 billion harbor expansion to export more iron ore. That was before the world’s biggest mining company scrapped its plan, and the hotel developer went bust.