Plus: BoC drama September 29, 2025 Sign Up | View online IN THIS ISSUE 7 min read 🧳 Tech talent 🪫 Lithium literacy 💰 Central bank chaos Morpheus was no dummy — the fight for the future really is all about battery power. | Warner Bros. THE WEEK IN MARKETS Surfing the AI spending spree The clear, bright-flashing-billboard takeaway from the markets so far this year — heck, the last two years — is that you can't bet big enough on AI. Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, Nvidia, Google — the more they spend, the more they're rewarded. And last week or so the trend continued, with Alibaba enjoying a 10% jump in its U.S. stock price after announcing it would blow past its US$50-billion AI spending target and Nvidia surging another 8% in the three days after it announced a $5-billion stake in struggling U.S. chipmaker Intel and a US$100-billion investment in OpenAI. The biggest AI spenders account for about 60% of the S&P 500's hefty 14% return so far this year; it's the answer to the question “why are markets up in the midst of a messy global trade war?” But why is spending money so exciting? Isn't the idea to make money? Yes, eventually. Investors are clearly betting that, someday soon, when we're all using AI every day for everything, the big spenders will be the big winners. And if that day never comes, or not soon enough? The global economy could be in very big trouble. THE CHART OF THE WEEK WHAT HAPPENED LAST WEEK IMPORTANT Will America's $100K visa fee steer more tech talent to Canada? RBC CEO Dave McKay certainly thinks so. Last week's seismic change to the U.S.'s H-1B visa program creates a “material opportunity,” he says, for Canadian companies to attract more highly skilled foreign tech workers. And doctors and scientists too, yes — but especially tech: 60% of current H-1B visa holders work in tech, and in the first half of this year alone, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft used the program to bring more than 20,000 workers into the U.S. All three of those companies have Canadian offices. Now they have a $2-billion reason to hire the next 20,000 here. Constellation loses its north star. Constellation Software is the best-performing Canadian investment of the past 20 years, and much of its success (as we covered on an episode of the TLDR podcast) is credited to “Canada’s Warren Buffett,” founder and CEO Mark Leonard. Last week the stock plunged by 15% after Leonard resigned from the company due to health reasons, with analysts calling his leadership “irreplaceable.” His insightful shareholder letters have also become a staple for investors — read some highlights here. INTERESTING Understanding how batteries work = understanding how to invest. Batteries are the “hidden plumbing of the modern economy” — they're in our phones, laptops, earbuds, cars, solar panels — and right now, two types of batteries make up 98% of the market: lithium iron phosphate, which is cheap and durable but requires a bigger cell, and nickel manganese cobalt, which is lighter but costlier. This Daily Brief essay makes a compelling case that understanding this difference — including where the two minerals are mined and which companies are betting on them — helps illuminate who stands to benefit from the industry’s growth. Canada’s working on becoming a larger source of the world’s lithium, but we're not a hot spot for cobalt, which is mostly mined in the DRC (although we’re working to refine some here). And when a tech product takes off, its battery type tends to follow: EVs, for example, want the lowest price for the most power (lithium!), while consumer electronics need the smallest storage possible (cobalt!). See, high school chem was good for something! Useful AI use-case sighting! A startup that reduces health-care waits. With so much of the global economy kinda sorta riding on AI paying off, we're always on the lookout for evidence of promise, and Yukon-based PeerSupport.io might be on to something: it uses AI to pre-fill medical forms, suggest referral opportunities, and help patients navigate an often labyrinthine records system. In a pilot test, addiction patients got care 27 weeks sooner than usual, and form-completion time dropped from 18 minutes to two. —Sarah Rieger FROM OUR SPONSOR THE FOMO INDEX by Stacey Woods IMPORTANT 🛒 Costco to “thin down” Christmas stock amid decreased holiday spending. Elf free to stretch out, take whole shelf. Source ☕️ New Starbucks guidelines require baristas to make meaningful eye contact with every customer. It’s part of a plan to lose all remaining business. Source 👩‍⚖️ Supreme Court grants doomed B.C. ostriches a stay of execution. Will now hear the trespassing case against Toronto raccoons. Source 🏰 Disney+ is raising its prices in the wake of the Kimmel controversy. It gives people the option to bundle their reasons for cancelling it. Source CRASH & BURN TO THE MOON 🤖 Robot umpires are coming to MLB next season. Human managers will really miss yelling at something with feelings. Source 🍣 B.C. sushi chef won’t provide extra soy sauce, even for $1K. But he might take a million for one night with the uni. Source 📺 MTV cancels Catfish. After 13 years, they finally saw it for themselves and realized it wasn’t about catfish. Source 🎤 Harry Styles runs the Berlin marathon in under three hours. Pretty fast when you consider how much a crystal jumpsuit weighs. Source WHO CARES THE BIG IMPORTANT STORY HISTORY LESSONS That Time Canada Meddled With Its Central Bank As you've probably heard, there’s some interesting financial-world drama going on to our south. President Trump has moved on from browbeating Fed Chair Jerome Powell about lowering interest rates to openly attempting to fire a member of J-Pow’s board of governors so that he can fill the spot with his own appointee. The situation has brought up plenty of questions about the importance of central-bank independence (and proved how funny most people look in construction helmets). It also might have you wondering if something similar could happen here. Welp, 65 years ago, it nearly did. And the fallout led to some very important guardrails we have in place today. Here's the three-minute version of a not-so-classic yarn: In the late 1950s, Canada was in a bad place. The economy was slowing down, and inflation and unemployment were way up. This story centers around two people: Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, whom not enough people called Dief the Chief, and Bank of Canada Governor James Coyne. Dief wanted the economy to grow, and in his first five years in office, he pushed through the equivalent of nearly $45 billion in today's dollars worth of spending, tax cuts, and government assistance. But Coyne thought fighting inflation was more important, since it could lead to a full-on economic collapse, so he ratcheted up rates by more than 4% in four years. And he took to the streets to share his disagreement with Dief’s policies. Dief the Chief was in disbelief. His finance minister quietly demanded Coyne's resignation. Coyne refused and went public, so the government accused him of taking an extra-large pension (that part's true) and labelled him a “communist in sheep's clothing” (can’t really say — we’re not fashion experts). Coyne called people a few names of his own and eventually was vindicated by the Senate. An hour later, he placed his thumbs in his ears, wiggled his fingers, and resigned. The result of this embarrassing and counterproductive tale? The government created a solution that would be helpful in the exact kind of crisis the U.S. is flirting with: it’s called the Rasminsky Directive. This update to the Bank of Canada Act says that, if the administration and central bank ever fundamentally disagree on policy, the BoC governor would implement the government’s orders, but the governor would also be expected to resign and provide a public explanation for why. The system works because it appoints an ultimate authority while 1) protecting the credibility of the bank, and 2) holding the government accountable. Are there examples of what happens when you don't protect bank independence? Yes. And they’re not pretty. See the current hyperinflation crises in Argentina and Turkey — or the ol' financial collapse of Weimar Germany that led to World War II. —Brennan Doherty OTHER VERY GOOD READS 🇨🇦 Is Canada Wasting Immigrant Talent? They were waiting for a pediatric specialist. Their Uber driver was one. | The Walrus 📱 Syria’s Silicon Valley When the regime fell, phones started working again. | rest of world 🏕️ Camp FIRE Summer camp for the “financial independence, retire early” movement. | The Globe and Mail* *Article is paywalled, which, yeah, is kind of annoying. But we think good journalism is worth paying for. THE WISDOM OF SOCIAL THOUGHTS ON TODAY’S ISSUE? Love it Good So so This week’s newsletter contributors: Devin Gordon (writer), Stacey Woods (writer), Sarah Rieger (news writer), Brennan Doherty (writer), Ambrose Martos (fact checker), Ciara Rickard (copy editor), Maude Campbell (copy editor), Sara Black McCulloch (fact checker), Mohini Tailor (lifecycle marketing manager), Eva Grace Clement Cruz (lifecycle marketing associate), Setareh Sarmadi (senior editorial producer), Matthew Karasz (markets editor), Jared Sullivan (senior editor), Peter Martin (senior editor), and Devin Friedman (editor-in-chief). 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