With which country is Trump threatening to cut trade?Ken Cedeno/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 headlines. Our business reporters come up with the questions, and you can show us what you know.
This week: With which country is Donald Trump threatening to cut trade and what alarm is Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem raising about the global financial system? Take our quiz and find out.
c. Roots Corp. says it has “initiated a review of strategic alternatives to identify opportunities to maximize value for shareholders.” What the heck does that mean? Among other things, it could include the possible sale of the retailer, according to a press release.
a. In a four-day visit to India, Mr. Carney signed a deal to supply Canadian uranium to India and launched talks on a comprehensive trade deal with New Delhi. The Prime Minister is trying to diversify Canadian trade away from an increasingly unreliable U.S. market.
b. Galaxy Digital, which likes to describe itself as the “Goldman Sachs of crypto,” is planning to delist from the Toronto Stock Exchange as of March 19. The departure of Galaxy is a blow to the TSX, which has suffered from a shrinking number of publicly listed companies.
a, b, c, d. All these companies are expected to go public. This is welcome news for the Toronto Stock Exchange, which has suffered from a recent dearth of new listings and a disturbing tendency for publicly listed companies to go private.
d. Mr. Trump has directed the government to stop work with Anthropic, and the Pentagon said it would declare the company a supply-chain risk. What is Anthropic’s sin? It doesn’t want its AI used to kill people without human oversight or to conduct mass surveillance of Americans. Gosh, so picky.
a. Mr. Trump threatened to cut off all U.S. trade with Spain after the country refused to let the U.S. military use its bases for missions linked to strikes on Iran. “Spain has been terrible,” the U.S. President told reporters. “We’re going to cut off all trade with Spain. We don’t want anything to do with Spain,” he added.
b. How times change: About 36 per cent of Gen Z Canadians don’t own a car, according to a study by pollster Angus Reid, published this week by car rental nmarketplace Turo. While vehicle ownership across the Canadian population has stayed relatively flat since last year, it’s declined 9 per cent among Canadians aged 25 to 34.
a. Mr. Musk is defending himself against accusations that he engaged in a pattern of deceptive behaviour that misled investors as he attempted to back out of his US$44-billion deal to buy Twitter before finally completing the takeover.
c. Mr. Macklem is is urging market watchdogs to take a closer look at “private credit,” the growing trend for businesses to borrow huge sums of money from non-bank lenders. The global private credit market now measures in the trillions of dollars, but is nowhere near as transparent as public debt markets, making it difficult to gauge how much risk is building up on private balance sheets, Mr. Macklem warned in a speech.
b. Brussels-based Swift – the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication – is the main global messaging network that enables secure international transactions, linking more than 11,500 banking and financial institutions. Canada’s biggest banks already use Swift to facilitate cross-border transactions.
d. China’s target for 2026 growth is its lowest since 1991, a reflection of growing domestic stresses and mounting protectionism in the global economy. To be sure, the new growth target is only modestly lower than the “around 5 per cent” annual growth that China has aimed for since the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, but it constitutes official acknowledgment of an increasingly difficult economic environment.