Blog

On TV the other night, the male lead, played by a beefy-looking Russian, was portraying a rugged outdoorsman. He was believable enough until he had to split a few pieces of firewood for his damsel -- and then the fourth wall sort of just fell on him....

Good afternoon. It’s almost Good Friday. I’m passing along a fairly readable COVID/economic update that speaks to the massive injections of liquidity filtering through the markets, and the latest COVID news. From the report: Terminal Terminological Drift?...

Friend of Seeds: Last week I wrote about Russian scientist Nikolay Vavilov. The storied agronomist had toured the world collecting a vast store of seeds and documenting their highest and best uses, in what he called a “mission for all humanity.” Like...

Rational disagreements, even heated ones, can be constructive if honest ground rules are shared. But shaming and political maneuvering haven’t been helpful in COVID-and-finance debates. Our choices will be judged by history, but we’re better off to embrace...

Good afternoon, News from the Front: This week at RBC we received a COVID update from our team, covering infection data, the pace of reopening, and vaccination news. Overall, it’s more positive than negative, even though Canada’s vaccination rate has...

Good afternoon. Yogi Berra sounded sort’a like an old-fashioned father when he said: “I’m not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school.” And in one of his more famous quotes he quipped: “The future ain’t what it used to be.” But maybe...

Driving to school, my daughter glanced puzzlingly at an in-progress real estate development near us, then asked: “How come the government is letting them build more houses -- I thought our population wasn’t growing?” Woven in to her question was a solar...

The Tycoon Next Door I’m interested in how tech giant founders manage to portray themselves as innocuous rebel coffee shop couch-sitters -- those friendly guys who grew up down the road and started up in their parents’ garage. There he is in his faded...

Bonkers! Never mind fundamentals. Will the business ever make money again? How’s the management team? Prospects for sales growth? Supply management? Is demand for the product somewhere between 8-track tapes and floppy disks? (Those really floppy, big...