Why did Couche-Tard pull its bid to buy 7-Eleven’s owner? Take our business and investing news quiz for the week ending July 18

d. The Japanese company’s refusal to engage in meaningful talks. You know all those people who warned that Japan is essentially closed to big foreign takeovers? Turns out they were right. Couche-Tard dropped its bid but accompanied the announcement with a blistering note that slammed Seven & i management for “a calculated campaign of obfuscation and delay.”

a. U.S. tariffs on Canadian goods will disappear. Okay, okay, this was not exactly a shock. U.S. President Donald Trump has shown no desire to grant any country tariff-free access to the U.S. market. Still, it was interesting to hear Mr. Carney concede that the best Canadians can hope for is a low level of tariffs.

b. 3 per cent. The Bank of Canada’s CPI-trim and CPI-median indicators both show underlying inflation to be around 3 per cent a year. The stubborn persistence of inflation is likely to deter the central bank from cutting rates, at least for now.

b. An office renovation. Mr. Trump has seized on a years-long renovation of Federal Reserve buildings as evidence of Mr. Powell’s incompetence. Nobody really believes this, but markets gyrated this week on speculation that Mr. Trump might use the renovation as a reason to fire Mr. Powell, who has resisted the president’s demands for lower interest rates.

a. Kraft Heinz is preparing to split itself up, according to the Wall Street Journal. And why not? The merger of Kraft and Heinz seemed like a great idea when investing brainiacs Warren Buffett and 3G Capital Partners engineered the deal back in 2015. However, it has produced lacklustre results over the past decade.

c. It owns luxury apartments in Manhattan. GO owns five residential towers in Manhattan. This is an excellent conversation starter. However, it raises the question of why the company is listing in Toronto. GO says it was attracted by Canada’s well established market for mid-cap REITs. We’ll see how that goes. Canadian investors have been mostly cool to REITs since central banks started hiking interest rates in 2022.

b. Starbucks. It’s time for remote workers to wake up and smell the coffee, so to speak. Starbucks chairman Brian Niccol said this week that corporate employees would have to be in the office four days a week starting in October. The Seattle-based company also said all corporate “people leaders” will have to be based in either Seattle or Toronto within the next year.

d. 1993. Ouch. There were only 502 sales of new condos in the Toronto and Hamilton area in the second quarter, according to industry research firm Urbanation Inc. That is the lowest level of activity since 1993.

c. Above US$120,000. Bitcoin surged past the US$120,000 mark this week. One big factor driving it higher has been the increasingly pro-crypto attitude of the U.S. Congress and administration. President Donald Trump has made millions by issuing his own crypto coins and the Republican-led House of Representatives has declared this to be “crypto week” as it takes up three different bills that aim to encourage use of the tokens.

c. It has lost 8,000 workers. Since May 2024, the CRA has reduced its workforce by more than 10 per cent, shedding more than 8,000 jobs. At the same time, federal data show CRA service standards are getting worse as the agency struggles to respond to inquiries related to annual tax assessments.

a. The type of sugar in Coca-Cola. Mr. Trump said Coca-Cola has agreed to use cane sugar instead of corn syrup in its U.S. beverages after he discussed the issue with the company. While some people have pointed to a potential link between high-fructose corn syrup and childhood obesity, most medical experts say the real issue is limiting sugar of any type.

d. Google and Brookfield. Google agreed to secure as much as three gigawatts of U.S. hydropower from Brookfield Asset Management in what the companies say is the world’s largest clean power pact for hydropower.