 Welcome to Mind Your Business ! Consider this your weekly guide to understanding what’s happening in the worlds of economics, business and finance. By Peter Armstrong
|  | The Canadian unemployment rate has climbed to 7.1 per cent. (polymanu/Shutterstock) | | | Following the economic data during a downturn can feel a bit like deja vu, a relentless Ferris wheel that just keeps turning.
I feel like we were just talking about jobs and the unemployment rate, and here we are again.
It's not looking great out there.
The manufacturing sector has been clobbered — for example, 38,000 jobs were lost in Ontario in the quarter running from April to June.
The unemployment rate in Windsor, Ont., a trade-sensitive area, has skyrocketed to 11.1 per cent, the highest in the country.
The trade war crashed into the Canadian economy just as the national unemployment rate was starting to climb. So President Donald Trump's tariffs have taken a bad situation and obviously made it worse.
Last week, one of Canada's biggest and oldest oil companies announced it would lay off 20 per cent of its workforce.
Imperial Oil will cut around 900 jobs.
The decision doesn't have anything to do with the trade war. Imperial is owned by Exxon-Mobil and the cuts are part of a global effort to make the workforce more productive.
I spoke with Heather Exner-Pirot, director of energy, natural resources and environment at the MacDonald-Laurier Institute, about those cutbacks.
"What Exxon and Imperial are doing is trying to be the lowest-cost barrel in the oilsands and also globally competitive. And so they aren't shutting in production. They have no intention of producing less oil. That means the royalties keep coming in. It means the sector is healthy. It means Imperial stays healthy," she said. "So it's hard to swallow. But this is about a corporation having the lowest possible cost it can have for a barrel of oil."
As she says, it's hard to swallow. And it's another blow to the unemployment rate in Alberta, which already had the third-highest in the country. | | |  | | | | | We will be getting an update to that chart on Friday.
Most economists think it probably won't get worse. But the forecast doesn't show it getting much better until sometime next year.
That's why the debate over whether we are in a recession is really meaningless for most people. The economy may not meet the technical definition (two back-to-back quarters of negative growth), but with very sluggish growth and a persistently high unemployment rate, it sure feels like one.
That same sentiment is increasingly common in the United States.
Jobs numbers have been weakening for months. Washington has announced billions of dollars in bailouts for industries clobbered by the trade war.
Consumer sentiment has fallen sharply.
It can be head-spinning to think about how enthusiastic Americans were in the late fall and early winter. They were convinced Trump would lead them down a road of deregulation and tax cuts that would fuel economic growth.
But most of what they are seeing has been trade wars slowing growth and causing damage.
This week, we will get the latest consumer confidence survey from the University of Michigan. It is expected to show confidence falling even further than it already has. |  | | | As you can see, last month, the survey showed confidence was still above the readings in April and May of this year (and still well up from the days of inflation concerns at the end of the Biden presidency).
But last month's numbers showed a trend.
"Although September’s decline was relatively modest, it was still seen across a broad swath of the population, across groups by age, income and education, and all five index components," wrote the University of Michigan team.
I will be looking to see just how much more that line has fallen in the last month.
What do you think?
Email me at peterarmstrong@cbc.ca
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forwarded to you. | | | Three things to read, watch and listen to this week | | |  | The Florida Panthers' value climbed 51 per cent last year. (Nathan Denette/Canadian Press) | | | 1. NHL valuations have taken off (again) | | | There's a clever little joke to be done here about how the Toronto Maple Leafs finally won something. The NHL franchise is (once again) the most valuable in the league.
The punchline is that even in that contest, it lost to the Florida Panthers. The Leafs may be worth $4.25 billion US, while the Panthers are a measly 17th-best at $1.89 billion.
But that doesn't tell the whole story.
The Leafs have always been at the top of that list because of irrational lunatics like me. Toronto's fans are legion, willing to spend and undeterred by nearly 60 years of failure.
No, the real story here is how much NHL franchise values grew last year. And on that front, the Stanley Cup Champion (and bane of my sporting enthusiasm) Florida Panthers are the very clear winner.
The team's valuation increased by 51 per cent on the heels of its back-to-back championships.
When star winger Matthew Tkachuk was traded to the Panthers in 2022, the taxi driver that picked him up at the airport asked him what he did for a living.
Tkachuk told him he was a hockey player. He says the driver responded by saying, "You must not be very good."
Now the team is the best in class and the franchise is posting the best year-over-year financial growth in the league.
Quite a turnaround.
Sportico calculates franchise values based on conversations with bankers, investors, lawyers, team executives and owners.
The sports business publication put out that yearly tally last week. It found the average NHL franchise is up to $2.1 billion.
That's an increase of 17 per cent.
"The total is more than double the $1.01-billion average in 2022. By comparison, the three-year change for the NBA is 78 per cent, followed by the NFL at 72 per cent and MLB lagging at 22 per cent," wrote Sportico's Kurt Badenhousen.
Check out Sportico's calculations here. | | | 2. Does Elon Musk own space now, too? | | | The numbers around Elon Musk's space business are kind of hard to wrap your head around.
Basically every number you read makes you stop and think about how on Earth that's even possible.
And this new Wired article is replete with them.
"His constellation has more than 8,000 satellites; its closest competitor, Eutelsat’s OneWeb, has about 630 satellites, each supplying less than 1/10th the bandwidth of a Starlink," wrote Wired's Noah Shachtman.
Last year, SpaceX had $13 billion US in revenue; $8 billion of that is from Starlink.
Starlink has put more than 8,000 satellites into space. It's launched more than 500 times in its lifetime and plans another 170 launches this year alone.
It has cornered markets that were previously the exclusive domain of companies NASA had developed for decades.
But the Wired piece isn't just an accounting of the rise of Musk's space companies. It asks a fundamental question about whether there's anything anyone can do to prevent Musk from controlling the business of space.
This may be the most interesting bit in the whole piece:
"The space industry — domestic and international, commercial and military — has been thoroughly remade in Musk’s image. The U.S. government and the Musk empire can no longer live without one another. They’re symbiotic. And the only one who can threaten that is Musk himself."
“He’s a dickhead,” a source adds, “but his tech works, like, way better than anybody else’s,” writes Shachtman.
Read the Wired article on Musk here. | | | 3. Why does everyone hate this stock market rally? | | | I've been thinking about the stock market a lot lately.
I write all week about the steadily weakening economic conditions and yet, I see stock markets setting new records.
One of my favourite podcasts tackled this thorny subject this week.
The TLDR Podcast asked why everyone hates this stock market rally. And as usual, they had some good answers.
Matt Karasz, head of trading at Wealthsimple, says the rally was launched by a combination of AI investments (and earnings), the Trump election and the shifting economic landscape, away from inflation and a cost-of-living crisis.
"You had this AI euphoria start to develop. And then at the beginning, the macro environment adds even more fuel to the fire. Because inflation was coming down over this period, so central banks around the world were cutting rates," said Karasz.
He says the annoyance with the rally stems from the fact that the exuberance around Trump started to falter when he made good on his threat to impose tariffs on basically everyone.
Stocks fell, but then once the shock of the trade war settled in, markets started to rebound.
"To everyone’s shock, the AI companies' stock bounced back even faster and even more than all the rest of them," he said.
So now, even as some of the biggest companies in the U.S. struggle under the weight of the tariffs, the AI companies are booming.
TLDR co-host Sarah Rieger (and author of the excellent TLDR newsletter) quoted Conor Sen, a Bloomberg columnist, who tweeted:
"I'm not sure if I'd classify this as a bubble, but 10 companies passing tens or hundreds of billions of dollars back and forth is certainly something."
Sadly, the TLDR Podcast made its own news at the top of the episode, announcing it is winding down.
Host Devin Friedman sounded optimistic the show will be back.
"[We] wanted to do something new. So for now, we’re saying goodbye but hopefully we will be back with something amazing and different and maybe even better very soon," he said.
Luckily for us, the TLDR newsletter will continue.
I hope the show comes back. I liked it. And I think this episode's take on the stock market is smart and interesting and worth your time.
Check out this episode of the TLDR Podcast here.
Check out the TLDR newsletter here. | | | How the economy looks beyond Bay Street | | | A jobs day with no data | | | I had saved this space for the latest U.S. jobs report that was supposed to be released on Friday.
The jobs numbers would have provided crucial insight as to whether the American economy was truly starting to feel the impact of tariffs.
Alas, the U.S. government shutdown delayed those numbers. Like many federal offices, the Bureau of Labor Statistics is closed because of the ongoing shutdown.
That said, there are myriad other measures of the jobs market. The most commonly used is the ADP National Employment Report.
It's basically a private sector version of the jobs data released by the BLS.
And, not surprisingly, it is showing weakness still pushing into the labour market. | | |  | Of course, there are those who think these numbers are rigged and not to be trusted. Even if we got the BLS numbers last week, surely Donald Trump and his supporters would have claimed they only reflect the damage left over from the Biden administration.
But that's why we have so many data points. Each one helps fill out a bigger picture.
And on the jobs front, the emerging image is not particularly good.
What do you think?
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