Tausi Insider

Amazon.com Inc AMZN-Q is reviewing unprofitable business units, including the devices unit, to cut costs, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. Shares of the company rose 11 per cent in morning trade. Amazon did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. As part of the months-long review, Amazon has told employees in some unprofitable divisions to look for jobs elsewhere in the company because the teams they were working on were being suspended or closed, the report said. Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant business, is also under review, the Journal reported, adding that the unit had an operating loss of more than $5-billion a year. https://www.tausiinsider.com/amazon-reportedly-reviewing-unprofitable-business-units-in-bid-to-cut-costs/?feed_id=443268&_unique_id=649f39059fcb3

Shopify Inc.'s headquarters in Ottawa on May 3, 2022. During the pandemic, the company partnered with the government on an initiative to help small businesses grow, and on the COVID Alert app. Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press Vass Bednar is the founder of Regs to Riches , a senior fellow at CIGI, and the executive director of McMaster University’s master of public policy in digital society program. I recently reported Shopify to … itself. The Twitter account “ Deceptive Design ,” which illuminates deceptive design patterns, had noted two fishy apps available on the app store of Shopify Inc. , the Ottawa-based e-commerce platform. One advertises the ability for merchants using Shopify to create fake low-stock indicators. Another adds faux time pressure for customers through a large animated countdown timer. These apps are made by third-party app developers and are not necessarily Shopify’s fault. But Shopify claims certain standards in its official requirements for apps . By a...

Cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which has filed for U.S. bankruptcy court protection, said it owes its 50 biggest creditors nearly $3.1 billion. The exchange owes about $1.45 billion to its top ten creditors, it said in a court filing on Saturday, without naming them. FTX and its affiliates filed for bankruptcy in Delaware on Nov. 11 in one of the highest-profile crypto blowups, leaving an estimated 1 million customers and other investors facing total losses in the billions of dollars. The crypto exchange said on Saturday it has launched a strategic review of its global assets and is preparing for the sale or reorganization of some businesses. A hearing on FTX’s so-called first-day motions is set for Tuesday morning before a U.S. bankruptcy judge, according to a separate court filing. What’s happening at bankrupt crypto exchange FTX? https://www.tausiinsider.com/collapsed-ftx-owes-nearly-3-1-billion-to-top-50-creditors/?feed_id=333568&_unique_id=6480f5d9a2bbd

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tours a rental housing development in Vancouver on Feb. 11, 2019. JONATHAN HAYWARD/The Canadian Press Mark Kenney is the president and chief executive of Canadian Apartment Properties Real Estate Investment Trust (CAPREIT). The solution to the housing crisis is simple: We need more homes, of all kinds. At Canadian Apartment Properties Real Estate Investment Trust (CAPREIT), we are part of that solution. We provide rental homes for Canadians. However, we have a simple problem. In the 2021 mandate letters, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asked the ministers of housing and finance “to expand Canada’s housing supply” and “review and consider possible reforms to the tax treatment of REITs.” These priorities are in conflict. A REIT, like us, is essentially a form of mutual fund. Investors buy into REITs, and the resulting funds are used to build rental homes. Like shares in a publicly traded company, investors’ stakes in REITs earn dividends and go up and down w...

A Toronto home for sale is seen in this 2019 file photo. Tijana Martin/Tausi Insider Canada’s bank regulator said it is not changing the mortgage stress test, ignoring calls to relax the rules and offer relief to borrowers after the spike in borrowing costs. The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, or OSFI, said the mortgage stress test for uninsured bank mortgages would continue to require borrowers to qualify at a rate of 5.25 per cent or two percentage points above their actual contract, whichever is higher. “It is prudent that lenders continue to test borrowers for adverse conditions,” the regulator said in a press release. OSFI’s announcement Thursday was part of its annual review of the stress test, announced each December. Carrick: Renting is a personal finance dumpster fire, yet it’s also the hottest trend in housing With mortgage rates hovering around 5 per cent, borrowers must show they can make their loan payments with an interest rate at 7 per cent. Tha...

An eagle tops the U.S. Federal Reserve building's facade, in Washington, on July 31, 2013. Jonathan Ernst/Reuters The Federal Reserve’s effort to shock the economy back to lower inflation is in its early days, making it tough for the U.S. central bank to avoid overdoing it with higher-than-needed interest rates, a top economic adviser in the Obama White House said after a fresh review of Fed policy since the Second World War. The Fed has raised its target policy rate by more than 4 percentage points in the last year, and “we are just now entering the window where the effects might start to be noticed,” Christina Romer, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and chair of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) from 2009 to 2010, told a national gathering of economists late on Saturday. “Because of the lags involved, policymakers are going to face a very difficult decision about when to stop rate increases or reverse course,” Romer said in a ...

Shell SHEL-N is considering exiting its home energy retail businesses in Britain, the Netherlands and Germany in the wake of “tough market conditions,” it said on Thursday. European energy suppliers have struggled over the past year with soaring wholesale prices and efforts by governments to shield consumers from rising bills. Shell said it had launched a strategic review of the three businesses which is likely to take a few months, but that no decision had been taken yet on their future. Shell injected nearly $1.5-billion in cash and credit into its British energy retail business in 2022 to help it weather huge volatility in power prices that caused the collapse of several rival UK utilities. Shell Energy Retail, its UK business, has 1.4 million customers, while its German business has 110,000 and the Dutch business 15,000. Shell said its wholesale and business-to-business (B2B) energy supply businesses were not part of the strategic review, and neither were its home energy supply b...