 Monday, September 29, 2025 | | | 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
|  | Damage from the trade war is starting to show up in U.S. economic data. (Lightspring/Shutterstock) | | | One of the most important questions today is whether and how much the tariffs will damage the U.S. economy.
That question became all the more pressing as U.S. President Donald Trump poured accelerant on the trade war late last week, when he announced a whole new suite of tariffs on trucks, pharmaceuticals and cabinets.
The truth is we don't have a very clear answer yet.
On the one hand, GDP numbers released last week saw the American economy picking up speed, expanding by a (much) better-than-expected 3.8 per cent in the second quarter (April, May and June).
On the other hand, the jobs market is showing clear signs of slowing. We will get the latest jobs numbers on Friday.
Earlier this month, the U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve, cut interest rates to bolster the economy.
Central banks don't generally cut rates because things are going well. And the Fed found plenty of cause for concern while making this decision.
"Job gains have slowed, and the unemployment rate has edged up,” wrote the Fed in its decision.
That doesn't sound so bad. But if you dig into the details, the picture that emerges is not a good one.
After adding an average of close to 220,000 jobs a month, the U.S. economy added just 22,000 in August (well below the expected 76,500 new hires).
In June, American employers actually shed jobs for the first time in nearly four years.
The jobless rate has climbed to 4.3 per cent, the highest level since 2021. | | |  | | | | | Of course, the U.S. president has dismissed these numbers and fired the country's top statistician. In particular, the president was outraged by revisions to previous reports.
"Those big adjustments were made to cover up, and level out, the FAKE political numbers that were CONCOCTED in order to make a great Republican Success look less stellar!!!" wrote Trump.
He certainly won't be upset by the revision to second-quarter GDP data last week.
During the April-through-June quarter, GDP rose at a 3.8 per cent annual rate. That's a huge revision from the original report, which indicated the economy grew at three per cent.
What's more, the revision wasn't driven by the usual, sometimes volatile categories, such as inventories and trade flows.
No, this was pushed largely by revisions to consumer spending. And serves as a heft, important push back on the emerging narrative that the U.S. economy is struggling. |  | | | The question for the American economy is whether the cost of tariffs has been averted or merely delayed.
The U.S. government is collecting tariffs at an annual rate of $350 billion US and rising.
Someone has to pay for that. Or more to the point, at some point someone will have to pay for that.
So far, the U.S. economy appears to be performing quite well. (Just as the Canadian economy has dodged an outright recession so far.)
But there is trouble in the road ahead for both countries. And this week's U.S. jobs numbers will be a key indication if that trouble is staying on the horizon or starting to crack the foundation of the American economy.
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 | | |  | Doom scrolling is becoming a bigger time suck than we're willing to admit. (Iryna Imago/Shutterstock) | | | 1. Using AI to keep me from doom scrolling | | | I hate my phone.
I mean, how can I actually say that about something I choose to spend so much time with, but here we are.
I have talked about limiting screen time, deleting apps and even mused about getting a dumb phone (that can only text or call.... but what about the parking app, or Uber or any number of things I've come to rely on).
Well, my former colleague Alexander Panetta just may have come up with the best option yet. He's using AI to give him the content he used to look for on social media apps like X or Bluesky.
And he's here to show the rest of us how to do it.
You'll remember Panetta from his time in Washington deciphering trade and Trump and just about everything else.
He's on a work sabbatical, getting a master’s in artificial intelligence management.
One of the things he's looking at is how we can use AI to make our lives better. Top of that list is finding a way to spend less time navigating the firehose of news that comes with today's digital media environment.
You don't want to turn it off — we need to know things. But we don't want to spend all day with our heads submerged.
"This is triply true now that we have this digital albatross in our pocket, ceaselessly pecking at our attention, prodding us to spend that day arguing about news, and click, click, clicking," wrote Panetta in his new Substack.
He goes on to explain how he did it. The short version is he used AI to help him code and find a way to curate his own news feed. More to the point, he shows you step by step how to do it yourself.
This way, he gets an email every morning offering him what he needs and wants. In turn, that means he's less likely to start scrolling through X looking for news.
The apps are still there, but I think Panetta's plan is a good one. I'm going to give it a try.
Check out Alexander Panetta's Substack here. | | | 2. Is America's largest oil field in trouble? | | | Regular readers know how much I like the Bloomberg Originals series. It's so smart and well done and visually, it's great to watch.
This week, the series is digging into a potentially disastrous situation unfolding in the Permian Basin.
"If the Permian was an OPEC member, it would be as big as Iraq and Kuwait combined," said Kevin Crowley, a senior reporter with Bloomberg News.
The Permian Basin is the world’s biggest shale oil production basin. It completely revolutionized the U.S. oil industry and in doing so, helped reshape the American economy.
But as we know very well in Canada, every oil deposit is different. And they all come with their own issues.
The issue in the Permian has become abundantly clear in recent years.
“The Permian has a water problem,” said Heather deShon, a seismologist at Southern Methodist University.
She describes the basin as a sort of layer cake made up of different kinds of rocks. Producers inject water between those layers of rock to extract the oil.
For every barrel that's produced, you also get as much as five barrels of wastewater.
“We call it water, but it’s pretty toxic stuff. It’s as much as five times saltier than the ocean. It contains oil and gas residue, and it contains all other manner of heavy metals and radioactive materials," said Crowley.
Injecting all that water into the subsurface was causing earthquakes. Not huge ones, but enough to cause concern.
So the operators and the regulators shifted wastewater disposal to shallower parts of the basin.
And it turns out that, too, caused problems.
“As you’re disposing more in shallow wells, you’re starting to build up the pressure in the shallow part of the earth’s crust. And eventually that leads to water leaking and becoming geysers,” said David Wethe, a Bloomberg reporter.
The episode digs into what that means and why it's already an enormous issue.
Watch this episode of Bloomberg Originals here. | | | 3. The big business of beer | | | This summer, I traveled to Dublin with my family. I let my young son take a sip of my Guinness.
We all laughed as he grimaced and shook his head.
It's a rite of passage. People have grimaced at the taste of Guinness going back to 1759.
I restrained myself from recounting the wild and amazing tale of Arthur Guinness and the whole Guinness family, which came to define beer, business and politics for a generation.
Good thing I didn't try, if only because Steven Knight will do a much better job than me.
Knight is the creative force behind the hit show Peaky Blinders. He's been tapped to write the next James Bond movie.
With House of Guinness, he turns the family lore into an eight-part mini-series now streaming on Netflix.
NPR says the show "feels like an 1860s, Irish 'Succession.'"
The Guardian review says Knight has made a name writing crime shows and that this has a very similar feel.
"He seems to be mining the same seam. The family here is not a crime family: we are in Dublin in 1868, where Guinness is so ubiquitous that the unimaginably wealthy Guinness family run the city," wrote The Guardian's Jack Seale.
Check out the trailer for House of Guinness here. | | | How the economy looks beyond Bay Street | | | Canadian GDP rebounded more than expected in July | | | Last week, we were discussing the GDP numbers and whether they would tell us if Canada could dodge a recession.
To recap, the technical definition of a recession is two back-to-back quarters of negative growth.
The second quarter (April, May and June) saw the economy shrink 1.6 per cent.
Last week, we got the official growth numbers for July.
And they were better than most economists were expecting. | | |  | We also got a preliminary look at growth numbers for August. Statscan says it was flat.
Combined, that means it would take a pretty sharp dropoff in September to meet the technical definition of a recession.
So, the good news is, Canada quite probably dodged an outright recession.
The bad news is, that's a pretty low bar. The difference between a slight bit of growth and a small contraction doesn't make a huge difference to most Canadians.
Even if we avoided a recession, it still feels like one, precisely because the economy is weak and struggling to find its feet.
And that doesn't look like it's going to change much before the middle of next year.
What do you think?
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