News / political
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1 min read
Poilievre Blew a 20-Point Lead, Then Called His Best People Liberals
Read more . . . →At the Calgary Stampede this month, Pierre Poilievre stood up and celebrated a BC Conservative leadership win over what he called “Liberal lobbyists from out East.” The men he was sneering at weren’t Liberals. Kory Teneycke ran Doug Ford’s campaigns and worked for Stephen Harper. Nick Kouvalis and Anthony Koch have spent years electing Conservatives. Their actual crime was telling Poilievre the truth last spring: that Trump’s trade war, not Justin Trudeau, was the thing that would decide the 2025 election. He didn’t want to hear it. He blew a lead of more than twenty points, finished with 144 seats,...
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1 min read
They're Spreading the Tariff Out So You Won't Notice Who Did It
Read more . . . →The New York Fed just published the part of the tariff story nobody at a podium will read aloud. Ask companies what they’re doing with the bill and 47% of service firms and 44% of manufacturers say the same thing: raising prices, with more to come. But the word that matters in that report isn’t “raising.” It’s how. The Fed calls it “trickle up” — you don’t jack the price all at once, because a jump big enough to notice is a jump big enough to get blamed on. You leak it in. A little on this order, a little...
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1 min read
Record Buybacks, Record Insider Selling. Do the Math.
Read more . . . →In July, S&P 500 companies announced $166 billion in stock buybacks — the biggest July on record. That’s the corporate treasury spending shareholder money to hoover up its own shares and tell everyone the stock is a bargain too good to pass up. So here’s the number they’d rather not put in the same sentence: the executives signing off on those buybacks sold $77.6 billion of their own stock in the first half of the year, the second-fastest insider selling pace in more than two decades. With their own cash, those same insiders bought back $6.9 billion. They sold roughly...
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1 min read
400 Companies Begged His Trade Office for a Break. That's the Confession.
Read more . . . →Trump has spent his whole second term telling you tariffs are a tax on China, on Europe, on whoever the villain is that week — the bill lands on foreigners, never on you. That’s the load-bearing lie of the entire project. So here’s the part he’d rather you skip: when his trade office opened the floor for public comment on the newest round, more than 400 companies wrote in, and almost every one of them was begging to be let off the hook. Ford. The electrical manufacturers. The people who import cigars. Nobody writes a panicked letter asking to be...
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1 min read
Citi Paid Fraser $42 Million to Cut 20,000 Jobs
Read more . . . →Jane Fraser is running Citigroup through the biggest layoff in its modern history — 20,000 jobs on the chopping block, 7,000 already gone — and the board handed her a 22% raise for it. Forty-two million dollars for 2025. The reorganization that emptied those desks is the same reorganization her pay package rewards. She didn’t get paid despite the cuts. She got paid for them. Here’s the part nobody says out loud: at the top, mass firing is a resume line. Every worker she cut was a number that made a slide look better, and the slide is what the...
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1 min read
BILL Had a Good Quarter, So It Fired a Third of You
Read more . . . →BILL Holdings had a good quarter. Revenue up 13 percent, earnings beat, the kind of numbers a company puts in a press release with an exclamation point. So on May 7 the board did the obvious thing with all that success: it moved to fire up to a third of the company — roughly 700 people out of about 2,333 — and on the exact same day authorized a billion dollars to buy back its own stock. Not a slow quarter. Not a demand cliff. A beat. The money was never missing. There was a billion dollars sitting right there,...
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2 min read
Microsoft Fired the People Who Make Your Games. On a Three-Minute Call.
Read more . . . →Microsoft just deleted roughly 3,200 jobs out of Xbox — about a fifth of the whole division — closed or spun off a handful of studios, and in Montreal it fired a dozen unionized developers at Bethesda over a three-minute video call where they weren’t allowed to ask a single question. Sit with that for a second. Not the 3,200. The three. The people who built the worlds a lot of us disappeared into for a thousand hours — Doom, Fallout, the games that got some of us through a couple of bad winters — got less time to absorb...
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1 min read
They're Boiling You Slowly So You Don't Notice
Read more . . . →The New York Fed just described, in polite economist language, a scam being run on you in real time. Companies are done eating Trump’s tariffs. They’re passing the cost to you — but not all at once, because a sudden jump would make you angry and paying attention. Instead they’re doing it a few cents at a time, month after month, a strategy the Fed’s own people call “trickle up.” Corporate America has a friendlier name for it internally: boil the frog. Turn the heat up so gradually the frog never jumps out of the pot. You’re the frog. The...
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1 min read
One Day Out, Four Days Locked Out
Read more . . . →Four thousand nurses at Brigham and Women’s walked off the job for exactly one day. Mass General Brigham locked them out for four. Read that again: you protest for a single shift over pay and staffing, and management’s answer is to bar the doors and tell you to come back Sunday. That’s not a labor dispute anymore, it’s a punishment, and it’s the clearest confession of who these people actually are that you’ll get all year. Here’s the part that should make your teeth hurt. The hospital says the nurses’ ask — roughly 7% over eighteen months, and please stop...
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1 min read
Parachutes turns 26 and it still sucks
Read more . . . →26 years ago today, Coldplay released their debut album Parachutes. It still sucks. This is the record people reach for when they want to argue the band was good “before they sold out,” which is the whole con — Parachutes wasn’t a promising start that curdled later, it was the finished blueprint for two decades of beige. Chris Martin already had the formula bolted down: strum four chords, aim the falsetto at the cheap seats, and mistake sounding sad for having something to say. “Yellow” bought the beach house and “Trouble” still leaks out of every coffee shop, but the...
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