Tausi Insider

Will the next bull market in stocks resemble the previous one? Don’t count on it. As major North American benchmark indexes rise from recent lows in October – punctuated by Thursday’s strong rally based on data that showed easing U.S. inflation in October – it is only natural to ponder whether the worst of this year’s sell-off is behind us. There are still many threats hanging over the market, of course. Inflation remains a threat, central banks will likely continue to raise interest rates, there is a looming recession and corporate profits are slowing. Nevertheless, observers are now wondering what themes might drive the next sustained rally and what leaders might emerge. There is a significant payoff for anyone who gets it right. Stocks that tap into sweeping secular trends can produce stunning long-term gains, in some cases not only leading the stock market over a number of years, but defining it. Think of technology stocks in the 1990s, the commodities boom prior to the 2008-09 f...

The processing facility at the Suncor oil sands operations near Fort McMurray, Alta., on Sept. 17, 2014. Todd Korol/Reuters Not that many years ago, the idea of showcasing the Canadian oil sands at an international summit on climate change would have been laughable. It is just three years since green energy think tank the Pembina Institute declared the oil sands as on a “collision course” with this country’s climate goals, and fewer than six years since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sparked fury in Alberta by commenting in a public forum that the province’s oil sands industry needs to be “phased out” as part of Canada’s transition off fossil fuels. So the fact that representatives of the Pathways Alliance – a consortium of Canada’s largest oil sands companies – not only attended the United Nations’ COP27 climate conference in Egypt this week but made a presentation Friday in the federal-government-hosted Canada Pavilion shows just how far the industry has come in terms of its willing...

The Canadian Association of Energy Contractors is forecasting a 15-per-cent bump in overall activity next year, but the industry continues to face challenges when it comes to crewing rigs and retaining workers. Todd Korol/Tausi Insider Canada’s energy services sector is forecasting a modest turnaround in activity next year after seven years of stagnation, but continues to face challenges when it comes to crewing rigs and retaining workers. As the country ramps up efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions, the Canadian Association of Energy Contractors (CAOEC) is calling for a 50-per-cent federal tax credit to help the industry roll out greener rigs and other technology to help reduce its carbon footprint. While oil and gas producers have enjoyed windfall profits this year thanks to sky-high commodity prices, the services sector that supports the industry is lagging behind. Far from the highs of 2014, president and chief executive of CAOEC Mark Scholz says, most of his members – the w...

Unfinished apartment buildings at a residential complex in Guilin, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China, on Sept. 17. STAFF/Reuters China’s biggest commercial banks have pledged at least US$162-billion in fresh credit to property developers, bolstering recent regulatory measures to ease a stifling cash crunch in the sector and triggering a rally in property shares. Three state-owned banks lined up around US$131-billion worth of credit lines to developers on Thursday, a day after three other lenders committed US$31-billion, responding to Beijing’s call for support. The authorities have been stepping up measures in recent weeks to support developers, after many defaulted on their debt obligations and were forced to halt construction. Economic prospects are also worsening due to renewed COVID-19 lockdowns and other curbs in cities nationwide. China reported record high COVID-19 infections on Thursday. The massive, co-ordinated injection of liquidity into the property sector buoyed t...

A new report by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. says government alone can’t solve the country’s housing challenges. The report by CMHC deputy chief economist Aled ab Iorwerth says the scale of the problem is so large that the private sector must be involved. The national housing agency says rent subsidies and more social housing are helpful, but more needs to be done. It says there must also be increased supply of housing aimed at the market. Home prices have eased this year as the real estate market has cooled, but they are coming off record levels earlier in the pandemic. The report says the imperative of increasing housing supply will be even greater as Canada seeks to attract more immigrants. https://www.tausiinsider.com/government-cant-solve-housing-issues-alone-private-sector-must-be-involved-cmhc-report-says/?feed_id=332358&_unique_id=645d53d77b13e

Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem takes part in a news conference in Ottawa, on Oct. 26. PATRICK DOYLE/Reuters Last Friday’s employment report from Statistics Canada may have looked like a yawner to the casual observer, but for Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem, the details were far from ho-hum. Sure, the 10,000-job blip in employment growth last month is effectively a rounding error in Statscan’s monthly labour force survey. But the broader trends emerging from the labour data are pivotal to the central bank’s charting of the future course of interest rates. Mr. Macklem has made it clear that he sees restoring the labour market to balance – bringing demand for workers more in line with supply – as central to the bank’s goal of returning inflation to its 2-per-cent target. As Mr. Macklem and his colleagues deliberate over Wednesday’s interest-rate decision – widely seen as a choice between another oversized, half-point hike and a smaller, quarter-point increase – some key detai...

A man walks at automaker General Motors (GM) Brightdrop unit's CAMI EV Assembly, Canada's first full-scale electric vehicle manufacturing plant, in Ingersoll, Ontario, Canada December 5, 2022. REUTERS/Carlos Osorio CARLOS OSORIO/Reuters Robert Asselin is senior vice-president of policy at the Business Council of Canada and former policy adviser to two prime ministers. When he became a presidential candidate back in 2019, Joe Biden made it unambiguously clear that his administration would pursue an aggressive industrial strategy to ensure U.S. competitiveness vis-à-vis China in key advanced industries and technologies. The recent adoption by Congress of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the CHIPS and Science Act – which received broad bipartisan support – are the manifest incarnations of his long-stated policy objective . For Canada, though, it is still searching for its own industrial strategy. As far back as August, 2020, I’ve written that Canada would be ill-advised t...

A person walks by a lit up sign during the COP15 conference in Montreal, on Dec. 7. ANDREJ IVANOV/AFP/Getty Images Canada’s negotiators at the COP15 conference say business groups and financial institutions have a role to play in preserving the planet’s biodiversity. Basile van Havre, co-chair of one of the Montreal conference’s working groups, says the private sector is looking for rules and certainty on the environmental effectiveness of its investments. He says it’s part of a larger push for performance standards that companies and investors can use to measure their activities against. The conference, which is bringing more than 190 nations together, is entering its second day of hard talks on hard targets for saving the world’s biodiversity. What’s on the agenda at the UN’s COP15 nature summit in Montreal? Negotiators hope to reach an agreement on how to protect 30 per cent of Earth’s land and water, as well as a deal on how to pay for that conservation. Van Havre says business g...

Railway workers picket outside Lime Street Station, in Liverpool, Britain, on Dec. 13. PHIL NOBLE/Reuters The United Kingdom recorded the highest number of working days lost to labour disputes in October for more than 10 years, official data showed on Tuesday, as employees went on strike to demand higher pay in the face of soaring inflation. The data comes as more than 40,000 railway workers begin their latest round of walkouts on Tuesday in a long-running dispute over pay and conditions, causing widespread disruption to the country’s transport network. The Office for National Statistics said 417,000 working days were lost to strikes in October, the highest since November 2011 when just under a million days were lost due to public sector workers walking out in a row over pension reforms. Between June and October this year, more than 1.1 million working days were lost, the ONS figures showed, the highest in a five-month period since early 1990. Workers across a range of sectors have g...

Courtney Robinson is the global head of financial inclusion for Block (formerly Square, Inc.) Private sector can inspiration from public sector book on how to invest purposefully in communities. Mark Blinch/Reuters You’ve probably heard the popular refrain that the private sector has a lot to teach the public sector, particularly in the innovation arena. But, when it comes to social-impact investing, the opposite is true – the private sector can draw inspiration and learn from the public one. I learned these lessons first-hand during my time as counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending and as senior counsel on the financial services committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. When Block’s treasury team was looking for a purposeful way to invest, I was able to share my experience in the public sector working with community development financial institutions. What began as a pilot US$5-million Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) investment, led by our treasury a...

Ontario’s tourism minister says the province won’t be extending the staycation tax credit for another year, despite the hard-hit industry recommending the move as a way to help it recover from the pandemic. Neil Lumsden, the minister of tourism, culture and sport, says in a statement that the province temporarily introduced it for the 2022 tax year to spur pandemic recovery for the tourism, hospitality and culture sectors. That will end this year, but Mr. Lumsden says the province is supporting the sector in other ways, including $48.1-million for festivals and events and $19.1-million in support for Regional Tourism Organizations in 2022-23. A joint report earlier this week from the Ontario Chamber of Commerce and the Tourism Industry Association of Ontario said the sector won’t fully recover until 2025 and suggested dozens of ways the provincial and federal governments could help. Those recommendations included permanently keeping the staycation tax credit, which allows Ontarians t...

A group of investors has tabled resolutions urging four of the world’s top oil and gas companies to set broad climate targets for 2030, reviving pressure on the sector after a year that saw governments shift their focus to energy security. Activist group Follow This said it had co-filed the resolutions with six major institutional investors managing $1.3 trillion in assets ahead of the annual general meetings of BP , Chevron, Exxon Mobil and Shell next year. In the resolutions, the investors call on the companies to set targets to reduce by 2030 greenhouse gas emissions including those from fuel sold to customers, known as Scope 3 emissions, which account for the vast majority of the sector’s pollution. Investors have in recent years ramped up pressure on the oil and gas sector to help tackle climate change, and the Follow This climate-related resolutions have drawn growing support among shareholders. However, last year the efforts largely sputtered as investors turned their focus mo...

Statistics Canada says the number job vacancies fell by 4.8 per cent in October to their lowest level since August 2021. The agency says the number of job vacancies fell by 44,300 to 871,300 in October. The month-over-month drop came as vacancies in the construction sector fell 17,200 or 20.4 per cent and administrative and support, waste management and remediation services dropped 11,000 or 19.9 per cent. Statistics Canada says no sector recorded a statistically significant increase in its number of unfilled positions, although vacancies remained near record levels in health care and social assistance. The overall job vacancy rate – the number of vacant positions as a proportion of total labour demand – was 4.9 per cent in October, the lowest since June 2021. There were 1.2 unemployed people for every job vacancy in October, up from the low of 1.0 in June, but down from 2.0 in February 2020, before the pandemic. https://www.tausiinsider.com/job-vacancies-in-canada-drop-by-4-8-i...

JPMorgan JPM-N said on Thursday it had set targets to cut emissions tied to its finance and deal making in the iron and steel, cement and aviation sectors, as those emissions linked to oil and gas usage rose. As the largest U.S. bank and major funder to the fossil fuel industry, investors and campaigners keenly watch JPMorgan’s climate efforts as the world shifts to a low-carbon economy. After releasing targets for oil and gas, electric power and autos in 2021, the new sector targets mean the bank now has plans to reduce emissions from all of the sectors most responsible for climate-damaging carbon emissions. For iron and steel, the bank said it aims to cut emissions per tonne of crude steel produced by 31 per cent by 2030. For cement it is targeting a 29 per cent cut and for aviation a cut of 36 per cent. The bank said all the targets were in line with the International Energy Agency’s Net Zero Emissions (NZE) scenario. Lucie Pinson, director of non-profit Reclaim Finance, welcomed ...

The Canadian economy grew slightly in October with the latest reading on real gross domestic product coming in higher than expected. Statistics Canada said Friday that the economy edged up 0.1 per cent, outperforming its preliminary estimate that real GDP would remain unchanged for the month. Growth in services-producing industries, led by gains in the public sector, wholesale and client-facing sectors, was partially offset by a decline in goods-producing industries, the federal agency said. Overall, output grew in 11 of 20 industrial sectors in October. Air transportation rose 5.5 per cent in October to the highest level of activity since February 2020′s pre-COVID-19 pandemic level. Still, despite nine months of uninterrupted gains, Statistics Canada said air transportation’s activity level in October was about 34 per cent below pre-pandemic levels. Performing arts, spectator sports and heritage institutions industries grew by 4.7 per cent amid more Toronto Blue Jays games than usua...

Canadian oil and gas companies are expected to increase spending in 2023, but analysts say it will be another year of modest growth and not a return to boom times. For Canada’s energy industry, 2022 was the year that finally snapped a decade of weak commodity prices and brought prosperity back to the sector. With the lifting of global pandemic restrictions, the war in Ukraine, and the cumulative impact of years of underinvestment in oil and gas, energy prices hit record highs in 2022 and Canadian companies reaped record profits. But most of these profits went to paying down debt and rewarding shareholders, not into major construction or infrastructure projects. And even though commodity prices are expected to remain healthy in 2023, that theme is likely to remain. “The oil producers have become far more financially disciplined over the last six or eight years,” said Philip Petursson, chief investment strategist at IG Wealth Management, adding the threat of a looming recession in 2023...