Welcome to The Globe and Mail’s business and investing news quiz. Join us each week to test your knowledge of the stories making the headlines. Our business reporters come up with the questions, and you can show us what you know.
This week: Toronto-based pension fund Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS) announced a deal to sell Canada’s largest medical testing company, LifeLabs Medical Laboratory Services, to Quest Diagnostics Inc. for $1.35-billion including debt. The buyer is based in Secaucus, N.J., but LifeLabs will keep its brand, its Canadian headquarters and its management team.
In other pension fund-related news, British Columbia Investment Management Corp reported a 7.5-per-cent return in the fiscal year that ended March 31, rebounding from a more muted 3.5-per-cent gain last year. BCI now manages $250-billion worth of assets, up from $233-billion a year earlier.
d. Buying hotels to house the asylum seekers. Yep, Ottawa may go into the hotel business to help reduce the soaring cost of accommodation for asylum seekers. In Niagara Falls alone, the federal government has been spending more than $100-million a year to house asylum seekers in local hotels.
b. Neiman Marcus. Hudson’s Bay Co. is doing the Neiman Marcus deal with help from Amazon.com, which will take a minority stake in the combined company, according to the Wall Street Journal.
d. All the above. If you want one number to demonstrate Canada’s dysfunctional housing market, try this: Toronto, with its multi-million population, managed to create only 2,585 family-sized homes between 2016 and 2021.
c. Gained about 5 per cent. Non-U.S. stocks (as measured by the MSCI World ex USA Index) gained just over 5 per cent in the first half of the year. Not bad – but nowhere near the 14.5 per cent that the U.S.-based S&P 500 index achieved.
a. Boston Celtics. The Celtics ownership group bought the basketball team for US$360-million in 2002. The franchise is expected to sell for more than US$4-billion.
a. They were down about 20 per cent. Vancouver home sales tumbled 19.1 per cent in June from the previous year. High interest rates are discouraging buyers and prompting more homeowners to list their homes for sale.
c. He is the brother of the chief executive. Tyler Proud is the younger brother of chief executive Matthew Proud.
d. They have grown nearly 50 per cent. Google’s greenhouse-gas emissions have soared nearly 48 per cent since 2019, according to the tech giant’s annual environmental report. The culprit is galloping increases in energy consumption, largely as a result of power-hungry new artificial-intelligence tools.
b. Online gambling. The Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse and Addiction is urging political leaders to treat gambling websites like addictive drugs.
c. Piling on debt. Canadian businesses are on a borrowing binge, according to data compiled by financial data service Refinitiv. Corporate debt deals between April and June nearly doubled from their level a year prior.
a. Making exaggerated claims about their environmentally sustainable practices. Greenwashing refers to the corporate practice of marketing products and practices as more sustainable than they really are.
b. 1989. The Topix’s multi-decade swoon was largely a consequence of the unreasonably high expectations that investors had built up for the Japanese economy in the late 1980s. Diligent readers might want to ponder the possible parallel between the stratospheric level of Japanese stocks in 1989 and the stratospheric level of U.S. stocks in 2024.