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: The Olympics were under way in Paris, but some of the biggest gymnastics took place in global stock markets. In the U.S., the S&P 500 fell 3 per cent Monday, then rose 1 per cent Tuesday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average took a 2.6-per-cent fall on Monday, then rose 0.8 per cent on the following day. While markets had largely calmed by end of week, a slew of earnings reports offered no clear direction for the economy’s future. Canadian Tire reported a profit attributable to shareholders in its latest quarter of $198.8-million, up from $99.4-million a year earlier.
Also: Maple Leaf Foods reported a loss of $26.2-million in its latest quarter compared with a loss of $53.7-million a year earlier.
d. 1987. The Nikkei’s crash was part of a selling frenzy in stock markets around the globe. The Nikkei did recover part of its losses later in the week.
b. Apple stock. Mr. Buffett revealed that he sold off slightly more than 49 per cent of his Apple shares in the second quarter. The sale helped raise the amount of cash at his flagship Berkshire Hathaway to US$277-billion, its highest level on record. It would appear that Mr. Buffett is not brimming with optimism about what lies ahead for the stock market.
a. Better-than-expected revenue and profit for the second quarter. Shopify beat expectations and offered an optimistic forecast for what lies ahead. The good news was a welcome contrast to the mood in May, when the company’s share price plunged by close to 20 per cent on concerns that its operating expenses were rising too rapidly for investors’ liking.
c. The ability to buy a small piece of an expensive stock. Fractional trading allows investors to buy a small portion of a stock that may sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars.
b. Pension funds. Ms. Reeves met with bosses of big Canadian pension funds, according to the Financial Times. She favours consolidating Britain's numerous local government pension schemes and turning them into something more similar to those from the the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan or the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Quebec.
a. Maintaining an illegal monopoly over online search. Judge Amit Mehta called Google a “monopolist” and said it uses its dominance in online search to squash competition and maintain artificially high rates for online ads. Among other tactics, Google pays billions of dollars every year to Apple and other handset makers to ensure it is the default search engine on new cellphones and other gadgets.
b. Pringle potato chips. Think of the junk-food synergies. According to the Financial Times and Reuters, privately owned Mars is manoeuvring to acquire Kellanova, a collection of snack and food brands spun off from Kellogg less than a year ago. Kellanova’s products include Pringles, Pop Tarts and Cheez-It. Mars already owns Altoids, Wrigley’s gum and Skittles. Would a combination of all these brands be nutritional? Maybe not, but profitable, yes.
c. About $2,200 a month. The average asking rent across the country was $2,201 a month in July, according to data from Rentals.ca and Urbanation. That was a hefty 5.9-per-cent increase from where things stood a year earlier. The glimmer of good news here is that July’s rate of increase was the slowest since 2022. Rent increases had been running close to 10 per cent a year.
d. It was up 25 per cent. Ottawa’s rhetoric seems to be running well ahead of reality. During the first quarter of the year, employers received approval to hire 28,730 people through the low-wage stream of the TFW program, an increase of 25 per cent from a year earlier and the highest quarterly number for such approvals in government records going back to 2016.
a. Stop attempting to limit the amount of reimbursements a passenger can seek in the event of a flight disruption. The Air Passenger Rights group alleges guidelines published online by WestJet are potentially misleading customers about their ability to get money back if a flight is cancelled or delayed. The lawsuit alleges that the airline’s limits on reimbursement are contrary to both federal and international rules.
c. It was reversing its plan to spin off its coal assets. Glencore scrapped plans to separate its coal division. When it acquired Teck Resources’ steelmaking coal unit this past year, it said it would merge the Canadian miner’s assets with its existing coal unit. It would then put the combined coal operations into a new company. Shareholders were cool to the idea, underscoring the tension companies face as they try to curb emissions while generating big profits.
d. All the above. As of Thursday morning, Intel shares had lost 44 per cent of their value over the preceding month, Airbnb had slid 25 per cent and Lundin Mining had declined 24 per cent.