Why are investors pushing for governance changes at Dye & Durham? Take our business quiz for the week of July 5
Welcome to The Globe and Mail’s business and investing news quiz. Join us each week to test your knowledge of the stories making the headlines. Our business reporters come up with the questions, and you can show us what you know.
This week: Toronto-based pension fund Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS) announced a deal to sell Canada’s largest medical testing company, LifeLabs Medical Laboratory Services, to Quest Diagnostics Inc. for $1.35-billion including debt. The buyer is based in Secaucus, N.J., but LifeLabs will keep its brand, its Canadian headquarters and its management team.
In other pension fund-related news, British Columbia Investment Management Corp reported a 7.5-per-cent return in the fiscal year that ended March 31, rebounding from a more muted 3.5-per-cent gain last year. BCI now manages $250-billion worth of assets, up from $233-billion a year earlier.
1Immigration Minister Marc Miller said this week that the federal government is looking for ways to reduce the soaring cost of housing asylum seekers. What is one idea he is considering?
a. Giving grants to asylum seekers to enable them to rent apartments or buy homes
b. Setting up tent cities to house the asylum seekers
c. Deporting asylum seekers who don’t meet minimum criteria
d. Buying hotels to house the asylum seekers
d. Buying hotels to house the asylum seekers. Yep, Ottawa may go into the hotel business to help reduce the soaring cost of accommodation for asylum seekers. In Niagara Falls alone, the federal government has been spending more than $100-million a year to house asylum seekers in local hotels.
2Hudson’s Bay Co. reportedly sealed a deal this week to buy which luxury retailer for US$2.65-billion?
a. Tiffany
b. Neiman Marcus
c. Harrods
d. Bergdorf Goodman
b. Neiman Marcus. Hudson’s Bay Co. is doing the Neiman Marcus deal with help from Amazon.com, which will take a minority stake in the combined company, according to the Wall Street Journal.
3Which of these relatively small communities managed to create more three-bedroom-plus homes in recent years than the gigantic metropolis of Toronto?
a. Peterborough
b. Ottawa
c. Niagara
d. All the above
d. All the above. If you want one number to demonstrate Canada’s dysfunctional housing market, try this: Toronto, with its multi-million population, managed to create only 2,585 family-sized homes between 2016 and 2021.
4How did stock markets do in the first half of the year? It all depends on where you were investing. Stocks outside the United States:
a. Lost about 5 per cent
b. Flatlined
c. Gained about 5 per cent
d. Gained about 20 per cent
c. Gained about 5 per cent. Non-U.S. stocks (as measured by the MSCI World ex USA Index) gained just over 5 per cent in the first half of the year. Not bad – but nowhere near the 14.5 per cent that the U.S.-based S&P 500 index achieved.
5An ownership group announced this week it was putting which iconic sports franchise up for sale?
a. Boston Celtics
b. Dallas Cowboys
c. Manchester United
d. Montreal Canadiens
a. Boston Celtics. The Celtics ownership group bought the basketball team for US$360-million in 2002. The franchise is expected to sell for more than US$4-billion.
6How did home sales in Vancouver in June compare with home sales in the city a year earlier?
a. They were down about 20 per cent
b. They were basically flat
c. They were up about 5 per cent
d. They were up about 10 per cent
a. They were down about 20 per cent. Vancouver home sales tumbled 19.1 per cent in June from the previous year. High interest rates are discouraging buyers and prompting more homeowners to list their homes for sale.
7What is noteworthy about Tyler Proud, the dissident investor pushing for changes at Toronto-based legal software company Dye & Durham?
a. He is the founder of the company
b. He is divorced from the company’s chairman
c. He is the brother of the chief executive
d. He is a published novelist
c. He is the brother of the chief executive. Tyler Proud is the younger brother of chief executive Matthew Proud.
8How much has Google been able to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions since 2019?
a. They are down 27 per cent
b. They are down 10 per cent
c. They are essentially the same as in 2019
d. Forget reducing them – they have grown nearly 50 per cent
d. They have grown nearly 50 per cent. Google’s greenhouse-gas emissions have soared nearly 48 per cent since 2019, according to the tech giant’s annual environmental report. The culprit is galloping increases in energy consumption, largely as a result of power-hungry new artificial-intelligence tools.
9A study this week urged Canada’s political leaders to develop a national strategy to deal with the impact of:
a. Smartphones
b. Online gambling
c. Weight-loss drugs
d. Artificial intelligence in schools
10Judging from recent numbers, Canada’s corporations are:
a. Finding it difficult to issue bonds
b. Slashing their debt loads
c. Piling on debt
d. Issuing large numbers of new shares
c. Piling on debt. Canadian businesses are on a borrowing binge, according to data compiled by financial data service Refinitiv. Corporate debt deals between April and June nearly doubled from their level a year prior.
11The Competition Bureau wants to crack down on companies’ habit of “greenwashing.” What is that?
a. Making exaggerated claims about their environmentally sustainable practices
b. Buying off environmental groups with large donations
c. Setting net-zero goals that are so off as to be meaningless
d. Buying carbon credits of dubious quality to offset greenhouse gas emissions
a. Making exaggerated claims about their environmentally sustainable practices. Greenwashing refers to the corporate practice of marketing products and practices as more sustainable than they really are.
12Japan’s broad Topix stock market index hit a record high this week when it finally surpassed the level it hit in:
a. 1979
b. 1989
c. 1999
d. 2009
b. 1989. The Topix’s multi-decade swoon was largely a consequence of the unreasonably high expectations that investors had built up for the Japanese economy in the late 1980s. Diligent readers might want to ponder the possible parallel between the stratospheric level of Japanese stocks in 1989 and the stratospheric level of U.S. stocks in 2024.
How well did you do?
Answer all of the questions to see your result
