Mario Anzuoni/Reuters, Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press, ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images/Reuters
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 in business and investing: Shopify, Starbucks, Netflix and more are in their earnings era. The e-commerce, coffee and streaming giants all reported their third-quarter figures this week, with largely good news.
Meanwhile, Canada Revenue Agency announced a last-minute extension to a filing deadline; a province mandated pay transparency for all job postings, and a philanthropist gave $100-million to his alma mater’s engineering school. Canada also flirted with a technical recession. (What does that even mean?)
Do you remember these stories? Take our quiz below to test your recall for the week ending Nov 3. The Globe’s real estate reporter, Rachelle Younglai, took this quiz and scored 8 out of 11. Can you beat her score?
a. Taylor Swift and Drake launched stores on Shopify. The company exceeded revenue expectations and returned to profitability in its third quarter. In addition to running stores for A-list pop stars, the company also launched a suite of artificial intelligence tools, finalized the sale of its fulfillment network, and benefited from a 20 per cent cut to its staff.
c. Tiff Macklem, about interest rates and inflation. The Bank of Canada Governor said the central bank could begin slashing interest rates before the country returns to the much-anticipated 2 per cent target for annual inflation.
d. British Columbia. Starting Nov. 1, all employers in British Columbia are required to include salary or wage information in public job postings. It’s intended to ensure “people are being offered the same pay for the same work,” the government said in a release.
a. Underused Housing Tax. The Canada Revenue Agency extended the deadlines for compliance with a new federal tax on underused housing. The new deadline is April 30.
b. Pumpkin Spice Latte. The fall-favourite PSL returned to Starbucks menus in (still a summer month!) August. That – plus new drinks like the Iced Pumpkin Cream Chai Tea Latte – helped drive U.S. same-store sales up 8 per cent in the quarter.
c. Affordable luxuries. “The consumer is stressed, but they’re going to go to ... those affordable luxuries,” Stephens analyst Joshua Long said. “Starbucks does a great job with that,” he added.
a. Queen's University. “My goal is to help Queen’s build the country’s top engineering school – one that’s recognized as among the best in the world,” said Mr. Smith, who earned an electrical engineering degree from the school in 1972.
d. Two consecutive quarters with a drop in real GDP. Two consecutive quarters of declining GDP is what some economists refer to as a “technical recession.”
a. True The Canadian economy has stalled in recent months. Following a contraction in the second quarter, Tuesday’s monthly report from Statistics Canada suggested that Canada’s GDP was ever-so-slightly lower in the third quarter, too. However, as David Parkinson writes, this is "no one's serious definition of a recession."
b. The declining response rate to StatsCan surveys. Canadian households and businesses are increasingly ignoring surveys that Statistics Canada uses to produce key economic figures, including labour market data. As Matt Lundy explains, not getting good data is a problem.
a. A cheaper, ad-supported plan . While the streaming giant has not (yet!) introduced a dating contest for Canada’s boomers, the new subscription option has spurred growth for the once-stagnant company.