Plus: how much skiers pay for fresh, natural powder February 10, 2025 Sign Up | View online IN THIS ISSUE 8 min read ❄️ Ski sales 🍁 Loonie losses 📦 Employment errors Some people want to grit their teeth and push through a job loss. But what if you want to lean into the awfulness? Below, we’ve got tips to make yourself more miserable. | High Bridge Entertainment THE WEEK IN MARKETS Is someone going to break up this party or what? If you follow markets, you may have noticed a paradox recently. On one hand, uncertainty is rampant (more on that below). On the other hand, global markets remain within spitting distance of all-time highs. How are both things true? Just look at the earnings season now in full swing: everyone is rolling in dough. Big Tech is leading the way: Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon each reported jumbo profits last week. What’s really notable, though, is all the money those four giants are pumping into AI; together they’re expected to invest more than US$300 billion this year, a larger pile than the sum total of investment across all Canadian companies in 2024. And one company’s spending is another company’s income, which is why AI has kept this joint jumping. The hitch is that one macro factor — like, say, an escalating trade war — could send profits plunging. But who knows if or when the music will stop? THE WEEK IN ONE CHART Ski passes are expensive! If you’re shelling out for lift tickets, it’s worth seeing how many prime ski days that actually buys you. We crunched the numbers. WHAT HAPPENED LAST WEEK IMPORTANT The trade war’s #1 victim: the loonie? As you surely know, last week, Donald Trump agreed to delay enacting tariffs on Canada for at least a month (other than steel, apparently). Even with the (temporary?) tariff reprieve, the loonie is still at a 20-year low against the greenback, mostly because of all the questions around possible future tariffs. (More on that in a moment.) For Canadians, a weak loonie obviously means imports are more expensive, but it also makes Canadian stocks and bonds worth less in global currency terms. That’s one reason why personal-finance pros talk a lot about diversification — that is, making sure you hold a big basket of assets from around the world, so that when something bad happens in one country, it doesn’t mess up your portfolio. Vanguard has some suggestions in that regard. Uncertainty is off the charts. For the TLDR podcast, we spoke with U of C economist Trevor Tombe, who told us about a site with a very on-the-nose name that indexes how shaky Canadians are feeling: policyuncertainty.com. The methodology sounds a bit hocus-pocus-y — the site tracks the use of “uncertainty,” “economy” and related words in news stories — but Tombe says wonks swear by it. And right now, the index shows that economic doubt is at a three-decade high. And Trump’s tariff will-he-or-won’t-he has weakened not only the loonie but also the economy at large, Tombe said, because uncertainty drags on business investment, which drags on growth, which drags on employment and so on. It’s enough to make you wonder if keeping us off-balance is Trump’s whole point. INTERESTING Someone is unethically profiting off unethical oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller. The book The 38 Letters From J.D. Rockefeller to His Son is the latest surprise hit in the booming “wealth-help” category; it currently sits near the top of Amazon’s economic-history charts. The curious thing is there’s no evidence that Rockefeller wrote a word of it. The “letters” are riddled with factual errors and read like they were composed by an AI model (e.g., “Dream+Failure+Challenge=Success”). So many AI-generated books have flooded Amazon that it capped the number of titles that users can publish to three per day. Publishers and authors, for their part, are suing AI companies to find out which real books got slurped up to help create these garbled reads. Shoutout to the YouTube user who, in the comments of the Molson beer commercial we linked to last week, asked, “who also came here because of [TLDR],” and the 118 folks who liked the quip. Funnily enough, we linked to the wrong Molson spot; we meant to direct you to “I Am Canadian,” which is 98% more patriotic than the one with all the models. —Sarah Rieger THE FOMO INDEX by Stacey Woods IMPORTANT 🫠 Canadian business and consumer insolvencies rose to a 15-year high in 2024. Conversely, the insolvency business has never been more solvent. Source 🥄 New research suggests that our brains contain enough microplastics to make a plastic spoon. Here’s hoping it’ll use itself to tunnel out. Source 📻 Spotify has its first full year of profitability. If this keeps up, it might eventually bump artists up to a whole $0.007 per stream. Source 💋 New romantasy book Onyx Storm is the fastest-selling adult novel in 20 years. So, the other solvent business is dirty books. Source CRASH & BURN TO THE MOON 🕺 Trump wants a sovereign wealth fund to buy TikTok. There must be an easier way to hype the Trump dance. Source 🌨️ Meteorologists say that groundhog Punxsutawney Phil’s predictions are only 35% accurate. Punxsutawney Phil says he makes 100% less than meterologists. Source 🧠 AI company tells job seekers not to use AI when applying there. Only want “detail-oriented, results-driven team players” who can think for themselves. Source 🧛‍♀️ Dolly Parton producing possible “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” reboot. Look for Buffy to slay some additional things, like back pain. Source WHO CARES THE BIG IMPORTANT STORY CAREER How to Be a Self-Destructive Bonehead If You Get Laid Off OK, confession: we started working on this story before the Great Tariff Panic of 2025. At the time, the unemployment rate stood at a pretty-high 6.7%. Then, after U.S. President Trump threatened to impose 25% tariffs on Canadian goods, everyone got really worried that the unemployment rate might soar higher. Thankfully, Trump and Trudeau reached an agreement to delay tariffs, and, fingers crossed, they can strike a deal to avoid sky-high levies altogether. But, no matter what happens next, knowing what to do when you lose a job is important, as is knowing what not to do (which are often sort of the same thing). That’s why, instead of rattling off straightforward layoff advice, we thought it would be helpful and fun to compile a list of ways to have an awful layoff. (And for those who don’t want an extra-awful job loss, this also works as a list of behaviours not to engage in.) 1. Make zero friends within your industry. The path to a debilitating layoff (which, again, is the goal here) begins while you’re still employed. Something like 70% to 80% of job openings are filled through personal or professional connections. Which probably has a lot to do with the fact that 70% of openings are never published on public job boards. If you don’t want to learn about these kinds of opportunities, don’t keep up email correspondences or attend conferences or social gatherings with folks in your industry. That’ll ensure no one ever thinks of you for an open role and you never benefit from networking (which basically every study ever conducted on the subject has found to correlate with career success). 2. Drain your emergency fund to buy something rad. One of the most effective ways to rack up a mountain of credit-card debt is to ignore the conventional wisdom that you should keep at least six months’ worth of living expenses in a chequing or savings account for emergencies. That way, you’ll be totally unprepared if you get pink-slipped. So blow that cash on something fun, like a custom-built racing lawn mower. You can put yourself in a bigger financial bind by refusing all seasonal or gig-work jobs, a common way self-preserving Canadians help cover costs in lean times. 3. Treat a layoff as a referendum on your entire existence. If your goal is maximum devastation, try to remember that your self-worth hinges on your professional status and that you’ll likely never recover from this setback (never mind that the average duration of unemployment is less than half a year). A 2012 study found that employees who keep their job loss in perspective tend to bounce back from difficult terminations. Which is not your aim. You should doubt yourself at every turn, since another study found that unemployed workers who remain confident tend to get rehired faster than those who don’t. Do not post on social media that you’re looking for work, either, or share links related to professional accomplishments. You might accidentally impress a headhunter that way. 4. Do not dare consider launching a business. All sorts of people have found giant success after running into a professional wall. Morris Chang started semiconductor giant TSMC after his career at Texas Instruments reached a “dead end.” Michael Bloomberg started his namesake company after his prior employer decided he wasn’t important to their business. But, to ensure you never launch a successful venture, ignore these anecdotes and convince yourself that the economy isn’t stable enough to bootstrap a business right now — never mind that Uber, Square, Instagram, and many other tech giants were founded following the 2008 financial meltdown. A 2022 paper found that recession conditions can actually benefit startups by forcing them to focus on their long-term value and by making it easier to retain talent. Which are findings you’ll also want to disregard. 5. Cancel your gym membership and binge your days away. Fresh air and exercise seem to help everyone else in the world. But what if endless doom scrolling is what you need instead? —Ben Mathis-Lilley OTHER VERY GOOD READS 💴 Trump’s China Plan Dates Back to the ’80s And instead of China, it actually has more to do with Japan. | The Guardian 🛬 Why You’ve Never Been in a Plane Crash In the U.S., it has to do with how blame is assigned. | Asterisk 🏡 Should You Buy or Rent? A Quick Formula to See A primer on the price-to-rent ratio. | Wealthsimple Magazine THE WISDOM OF SOCIAL Wait until he finds out about “fidelity.” THOUGHTS ON TODAY’S ISSUE? Love it Good So so This week’s newsletter contributors: Ben Mathis-Lilley (writer), Devin Gordon (writer), Stacey Woods (writer), Sarah Rieger (news writer), Ambrose Martos (fact checker), Ciara Rickard (copy editor), Clare Douglas (copy editor), Sara Black McCulloch (fact checker), Mohini Tailor (lifecycle marketing manager), Matthew Karasz (markets editor) Jared Sullivan (senior editor), Peter Martin (senior editor), Kat Angus (managing editor), and Devin Friedman (editor-in-chief). Disclosures: Contributors to this newsletter own shares in Amazon and Google. Wealthsimple Media Inc. 80 Spadina Ave Suite 400 Toronto, ON, M5V 2J4 VIEW IN BROWSER PRIVACY POLICY UNSUBSCRIBE Rewards are only available to clients that meet the minimum asset requirement with Wealthsimple: one reward is available starting at $200,000, with one additional reward on every increment of $100,000, up to a maximum of three rewards. Conditions apply. Full terms at www.wealthsimple.com/benefits. 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