Tausi Insider

U.S. President Joe Biden speaks at the COP27 climate conference, in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, on Nov. 11. SeanGallup/Getty Images U.S. President Joe Biden, speaking Friday at an annual international summit on climate change, urged world leaders to “double down” on their resolve to fight global warming, saying Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reinforces the need to phase out fossil fuels. “We can no longer plead ignorance to the consequences of our actions, or continue to repeat our mistakes,” Mr. Biden said. The President’s brief attendance at the United Nations climate conference, known as COP27, was largely a victory lap as he emphasized new spending on clean energy initiatives that will “change the paradigm” for the United States and the rest of the world. But Mr. Biden glossed over how he’s pushed for more oil and gas production to bring down costs that have been politically troublesome at home, and fuelled the invasion of Ukraine by allowing Russia to fetch higher prices for its energ...

The sun sets behind the COP27 logo outside the conference venue on Saturday, Nov. 12 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Peter Dejong/The Associated Press It’s halfway time at the UN climate talks in Egypt, with negotiators still working on draft agreements before ministers arrive next week to push for a substantial deal to fight climate change. The two-week meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh started with strong appeals from world leaders for greater efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions and help poor nations cope with global warming. Scientists say the amount of greenhouse gases being pumped into the atmosphere needs to be halved by 2030 to meet the goals of the Paris climate accord. The 2015 pact set a target of ideally limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, but left it up to countries to decide how they want to do so. Here is a look at the main issues on the table at the COP27 talks: What about the U.S. and China? The top U.S. negoti...

The U.S. Federal Reserve may consider slowing the pace of rate increases at its next meeting but that should not be seen as a “softening” in its commitment to lower inflation, Federal Reserve Gov. Christopher Waller said on Sunday. Markets should now pay attention to the “endpoint” of rate increases, not the pace of each move, and that endpoint is likely still “a ways off,” Waller said in response to a series of questions on monetary policy at an economic conference organized by UBS in Australia. “It depends on inflation.” “We’re at a point we can start thinking maybe of going to a slower pace,” Waller said, but “we’re not softening...Quit paying attention to the pace and start paying attention to where the endpoint is going to be. Until we get inflation down, that endpoint is still a ways out there.” A report released last week showing slower than expected inflation in October was “good news,” but was “just one data point” that would have to be followed with other similar readings t...

The question I work night shifts at my company, however, the HR department only works from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. I would like to book an appointment with them to discuss some concerns I have about my manager and they say that I need to come in during work hours to meet with them in person. It’s inconvenient for me to come in during the 9-5. Should I be compensated for the meeting time? Does the HR department have an obligation to meet with me during my working hours if I need to discuss workplace concerns? The first answer Marion Blight , associate, Randy Ai Law Office, Toronto I’m sorry that you are having difficulty accessing your employer’s human resources, but there isn’t really a special obligation here for HR to be the one who accommodates your schedule. If you would like to have this meeting, then it can happen on their terms, within reason. However, whoever is required to come in during their off hours to handle this matter should at least be compensated. HR would certainly be wo...

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks with Thailand's Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha, during a meeting at Government House, in Bangkok, Thailand, on Nov. 17. POOL/Reuters Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s tour of Southeast Asia includes a brief stop in Bangkok, which is a visit aimed at showing Canada is serious about forming deeper ties with the region. The two-day visit to Thailand is for Trudeau to take part in the leaders’ meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, a group of 21 economies on both sides of the Pacific that work together to break down barriers to trade. “Showing up is critically important. In Asia in particular, face-to-face relationships are vitally important,” said Timothy Dattels, one of Canada’s three representatives to the APEC Business Advisory Council. “Long-term relationship building is absolutely critical to business; it’s not all just done over the phone, at all,” said Dattels, an investor specializing in the region. He noted that major pl...

As companies are adapting to new ways of working at varying speeds, there is a need for organizations, teams and individuals to optimize and prioritize along new dimensions: What work is best suited in-office versus remote? What is best accomplished synchronously versus asynchronously? How can we rethink and revitalize meetings so we aren’t stuck in meetings all day with no time to think or do? Many employees are overstretched and overwhelmed, finding there aren’t enough hours in the day to deliver on commitments. According to Microsoft’s September 2022 Work Trends Index , 48 per cent of employees and 53 per cent of managers say they are already burned out. In the same report, it was noted that last spring, meetings had increased by 153 per cent since the start of the pandemic, “double bookings” increased by 46 per cent in the last year and, in an average week, 42 per cent of participants multitask during meetings. This goes to show that, in many cases, there is no slack in the syste...

Federal Reserve officials at their last meeting saw “very few signs that inflation pressures were abating” before raising their benchmark interest rate by a substantial three-quarters of a point for a fourth straight time. Rising wages, the result of a strong job market, combined with weak productivity growth, were “inconsistent” with the Fed’s ability to meet its 2 per cent target for annual inflation, the policy-makers concluded, according to the minutes of their Nov. 1-2 meeting released Wednesday. But they also agreed that smaller rate hikes “would likely soon be appropriate. The Fed is widely expected to slow its rate hikes to a half-point increase when it next meets in mid-December. At their meeting early this month, the Fed officials also expressed uncertainty about how long it might take for their rate hikes to slow the economy enough to tame inflation. Chair Jerome Powell stressed at a news conference after this month’s meeting that that the Fed isn’t even close to declaring...

Flags fly in front of the European Central Bank building, in Frankfurt, Germany, on July 21. WOLFGANG RATTAY/Reuters European Central Bank policy-makers feared that inflation may be getting entrenched at their last policy gathering so rates would need to rise further, the accounts of the Oct. 26-27 meeting showed on Thursday. The ECB raised rates by 75 basis points to 1.5 per cent at the meeting to fight sky high inflation, bringing its total hikes to 200 basis points since July for its fastest policy tightening on record. Policy-makers also put the reduction of the bank’s €9-trillion balance sheet on the agenda – inching closer to unwinding a decade worth of government debt purchases aimed at rekindling inflation that had been undershooting the ECB’s objective. “It was also clear that rates would need to be raised further to reach a level that would deliver on the ECB’s 2 per cent medium-term target,” the accounts of the meeting showed. The ECB added that some policy-makers even exp...

Elon Musk on Wednesday tweeted that the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from Apple Inc’s AAPL-Q App Store was resolved following his meeting with the iPhone maker’s Chief Executive Tim Cook. “Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so,” the billionaire CEO of Twitter and Tesla Inc said in a tweet. On Monday, Musk had accused Apple of threatening to block Twitter from its app store without saying why in a series of tweets that also said it had stopped advertising on the social media platform. He had later tagged Cook’s Twitter account in another tweet, asking “what’s going on here?” Twitter and Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Musk’s latest tweet. Apple has not responded publicly to Musk’s earlier tweets. Among the list of grievances tweeted by Musk on Monday was the up to 30 per cent fee Apple charges software developers for in-app purchases, with Musk posting a meme suggesting he was willing to “go to war” with Apple rathe...

OPEC+ is likely to stick to its current oil output target when it meets on Sunday, two OPEC+ sources said on Friday, although some say a further output cut is not completely off the table given concern about economic growth and demand. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and allies led by Russia, a group known as OPEC+, has switched its planned in-person meeting in Vienna on Dec. 4 to a virtual one, which sources in the group say signals the likelihood of it leaving policy unchanged. “It is unlikely there will be any change to the policy,” an OPEC+ source said. Another source made similar remarks, also declining to be identified by name. Talks begin on Saturday when OPEC ministers hold a virtual meeting at 1100 GMT. OPEC+ begins talks at the same time on Sunday with a meeting of the advisory Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee (JMMC) panel, followed by the full ministerial conference. With oil prices and the economic outlook weakening, the group agreed in ...

The logo of the Organization of the Petroleoum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is seen outside of OPEC's headquarters in Vienna, Austria, on March 3. Lisa Leutner /The Associated Press OPEC+ agreed to stick to its oil output targets at a meeting on Sunday as the oil markets struggle to assess the impact of a slowing Chinese economy on demand and a G7 price cap on Russian oil on supply. The decision comes two days after the Group of Seven (G7) nations agreed a price cap on Russian oil. OPEC+, which comprises the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and allies including Russia, angered the United States and other Western nations in October when it agreed to cut output by 2 million barrels per day (bpd), about 2% of world demand, from November until the end of 2023. Washington accused the group and one of its leaders, Saudi Arabia, of siding with Russia despite Moscow’s war in Ukraine. OPEC+ argued it had cut output because of a weaker economic outlook. Oil prices hav...

Police officers patrol outside the Palais de Congres, during the opening of COP15 on Dec. 6, the two-week U.N. biodiversity summit in Montreal. CHRISTINNE MUSCHI/Reuters Delegates have reached the starting line for COP15 in Montreal, the 15th United Nations conference on biodiversity, where work on a new international agreement to protect nature is set to commence on Wednesday. But participants say the road ahead is already looking like a steep, uphill climb. For representatives from 196 countries who are party to the UN Convention on Biodiversity, the central purpose of the meeting is to hammer out a new framework under the convention, with agreed targets to be met by 2030. The previous framework expired in 2020 with none of its targets met. COP15 was initially intended to take place that year in China, but its completion has been delayed two years by the COVID-19 pandemic and the venue shifted to Montreal. The conference, taking place at Montreal’s Palais des congrès, is surrounded...

Canada’s most prominent banks and insurers say they are sticking with the virtual or hybrid annual general meetings they adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic for another year. The group of 12 banks and insurers say they recently obtained a court order allowing them to hold the meetings in these formats again. Though they acknowledge the COVID-19 situation has improved this year, they say they want to use virtual and hybrid meetings because the virus is so “unpredictable.” They add that using the formats will also allow them to respect protocols recommended by public health authorities. The group, which includes Royal Bank of Canada, TD Bank Group, Sun Life Financial Inc. and Manulife Financial Corp., were granted a similar order in March 2020, December 2020 and December 2021. Rounding out the group are Bank of Montreal, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Canadian Western Bank, Laurentian Bank, Bank of Nova Scotia, National Bank, Great-West Lifeco and Canada Life. https://www.ta...

Officials speak ahead of an extraordinary meeting of EU energy ministers at the European Council building, in Brussels, on Dec. 13. Virginia Mayo/The Associated Press European Union energy ministers meeting in Brussels on Tuesday failed to strike a final deal on a bloc-wide cap on natural gas prices, after months of infighting over whether the measure can ease Europe’s energy crisis. Responding to repeated requests from some countries, the European Commission proposed a price cap last month as the latest EU response to the economic upheaval caused by Russia cutting natural gas deliveries to Europe this year, leading to energy price spikes. But with countries deeply divided over the details of the proposed cap, Tuesday’s meeting did not yield a final decision – leaving EU energy ministers to try again for an agreement at another meeting on Dec. 19. “We have made progress, but we are not done yet. Not all questions could be answered today,” German Economy Minister Robert Habeck said af...

Traders boosted bets Tuesday that cooling inflation will allow the Federal Reserve to continue to taper its interest-rate hikes into next year and likely end them in March, after a government report showed consumer prices last month rose at their slowest pace in nearly a year. Fed funds futures prices implied a better-than-even chance that the Fed will follow an expected half-point interest-rate hike at its policy-setting meeting this week with smaller 25-basis-point rate hikes at its first two meetings of 2023, with some chance the last hike could come in May instead of March. That would bring the policy rate to the 4.75 per cent-5 per cent range, lower than some economists have expected and markets had been betting, given what has been stubbornly high inflation and a stronger-than-expected labor market. The shift in expectations came after a Labor Department report showed consumer prices rose 0.1 per cent in November from the month prior, less than forecast. The slowdown, from a 0....

Large banks and insurers have once again jointly obtained a court order that permits them to hold either online-only or hybrid annual general meetings. Jenny Kane/The Associated Press Financial institutions: Do right by your shareholders and meet them face-to-face next year. Large banks and insurers have once again jointly obtained a court order that permits them to hold either online-only or hybrid annual general meetings (a format that allows investors to attend virtually or in the flesh) because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It may sound inconsequential, but it’s not. The 2023 AGM season will mark the fourth straight year that some of Canada’s largest companies will have legal cover to forgo in-person gatherings entirely even though electronic-only meetings erode shareholders’ rights. Yes, coronavirus is still with us. But given that many of these same corporations are urging their employees to return to the office, it’s starting feel like one of the lingering effects of the pandemic ...

To master the world you must master yourself, advises Toronto-based executive coach Craig Dowden. And high on the list of what you must master are your mindset, emotions and strengths. Our mindset affects how we process information and affects our experiences. “Imagine you’re getting ready for an upcoming meeting and are thinking, ‘This is going to be torturous and a complete waste of time.’ Guess how the meeting turns out?” he writes in A Time to Lead . Mr. Dowden places great stock in having a “growth mindset,” in which we are energized about new opportunities, rather than a fixed mindset, in which we prefer tasks we already do well and don’t expect to make mistakes. A growth mindset allows us to handle challenges and setbacks better, because we have a more flexible approach. Indeed, for those with a growth mindset, a setback becomes a puzzle to figure out rather than a reason to give up. We are likely to put more effort into improving ourselves because we believe such change is p...