Description: Zeynel Ari said that the time it took him to walk from a parking lot, into his bank, then back to the lot, was all the time it took for thieves to grab his vehicle. Car theft rings are getting better at their illegal craft, with the number of stolen vehicles in Ontario rising… Read more »
Posts By: Brent White
Insolvencies Up
Description: Insolvencies in Canada were up 22.5% over the same quarter last year. Statistics Canada said this was the largest year-over-year increase in 13 years. During the pandemic, a number of government programs seemed to have helped businesses and consumers to avoid this level of financial difficulty. But the rise of inflation, increasing interest rates,… Read more »
Silence at Sobeys
Description: Sobeys has gone virtually silent in the face of an apparent data breach last week. Customers at Sobeys and other related Empire Company stores, found themselves unable to process transactions normally. Problems included filling prescriptions at the pharmacy. Another food company, Canada Packers, also had similar problems last week, but it took a different… Read more »
No Gold Here
Description: Did you know that the Bank of Canada, unlike central banks in a number of other nations, does not hold any gold reserves? About twenty years ago the Bank sold off all of its gold holdings, claiming the cost of holding gold and the higher returns available from foreign bonds made gold a bad… Read more »
A Good Month for Jobs
Description: October was a good month for the Canadian economy with 108,000 new jobs added, exceeding projections by a factor of ten. Because more Canadians were actually looking for work last month, the unemployment rate remained steady at 5.2%. Despite the good news on the employment front, a higher number of Canadians report having trouble… Read more »
Tax on Stock Buybacks
Description: The federal government is set to introduce a 2% tax on stock buybacks. The government hopes this move will encourage companies to reinvest their profits in order to grow and benefit the Canadian economy, rather than buying back shares with excess cash. Kim Forrest of Bokeh Capital Partners does not believe the 2% penalty… Read more »
Private Equity Firm Buying Rona
Description: Sycamore Partners, a private equity firm located in New York, is buying retailer Rona, along with several related parties, from Lowes. Lowes said it is making the sale in a move to simplify its business model. Sycamore is paying $400 million for the deal along with additional compensation that will depend upon performance. Date:… Read more »
Health Benefits Bring Workers
Description: Restaurant employees have long been used to working without employer sponsored health benefit plans. But in this time of staff shortages, restaurateurs, such as Calgary’s Antonio Migliarese, are seeing health and dental benefits as way to attract and retain a quality staffers. As line cook Maddy Vine states, in “an industry that’s all about… Read more »
Phoenix Problems Persist
Description: Well, the good news is that only 28% of federal government employees had an error in their pay during the fiscal year ended 31 March 2022. According to the federal auditor general, that is down from 47% in the prior year, indicating that, although results have improved, the maligned Phoenix pay system is far… Read more »
Facebook Falling
Description: The stock price of Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has been tanking. On Thursday, the markets wiped out 20 percent of the big tech giant’s market valuation, following two quarter’s of revenue declines. Investors see former Facebook advertisers heading off to TikTok as one of Meta’s problems. Others see the billions of spending on the… Read more »