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Inflation exceeded the Bank of Canada’s control range for a sixth straight month, worsened by supply chain bottlenecks that are proving stubbornly persistent.
The consumer price index rose 4.4 per cent in September from a year earlier, Statistics Canada reported Wednesday in Ottawa. That’s the highest reading since February 2003, exceeding consensus expectations of 4.3 per cent in a Bloomberg survey of economists.
On a monthly basis, inflation was up 0.2 per cent in September. Higher food, shelter and transport prices were the main contributors. The average of the central bank’s core measures — often seen as a better gauge of underlying price pressures — ticked up to 2.67 per cent from 2.6 per cent in August.
The hot inflation readings of the last six months are deepening a communications challenge for Governor Tiff Macklem, who maintains the spike in consumer-price gains will be short lived. The data also come as traders in the overnight swaps market bet increasingly against the Bank of Canada’s guidance that policymakers won’t raise interest rates until the second half of next year…read more.
With oil prices rallying in recent weeks, it looks like we are going to see $100 a barrel oil, John Catsimatidis, who is active in both the oil and food business, told FOX Business on Monday.
“With oil nearly at $84 this morning, we are going to see $100 oil, it looks like, there’s no sign of it stopping,” said Catsimatidis, who is chief executive of United Refining Company, and president and CEO of Gristedes, D’Agostino Foods, and the Red Apple Group.
“Food prices are going up tremendously,” Catsimatidis told FOX Business.
Food prices are going up very fast because nobody wants to be behind the curve, and everyone is raising prices, the executive said.
Catsimatidis expects prices to rise by 10 percent in the next 60 days, inflation not to go away any time soon, and supply-chain issues to likely persist through the middle of 2022.
The billionaire U.S. businessman with interests in the oil and food business, among others, is not alone in his forecast that oil prices could hit $100 per barrel.
Oil could hit $100 in case of a colder winter, some analysts and investment banks have said in recent weeks. Record-high natural gas prices are forcing some utilities to switch to oil derivatives instead, boosting demand for crude…read more.
Hi all, James Frith here again this week. I want to look at how Canada is re-positioning itself to take advantage of the growing electric vehicle supply chain, after years of overlooking the battery industry.
Despite having all of the critical ingredients for lithium-ion batteries — nickel, cobalt, lithium, graphite — Canada doesn’t have any EV cell or component manufacturing; and it has only about 10% of the battery demand of the U.S. Combined with a lack of government support for the battery supply chain, it had seemed that Canada was destined to lose the value-add of its raw materials as they are exported to countries that had invested in battery production.
We’ve seen this type of relationship in the battery supply chain before, in particular between Australia and China. In 2020, Australia accounted for almost 50% of global lithium production, but the majority of this material was exported to China for refining. China accounts for 75% of battery materials refining capacity today, but sources almost all of its raw materials (nickel, cobalt, lithium, graphite, manganese) from overseas.
Australia is beginning to claim some of the value in its own raw materials. In August this year, Chinese lithium miner Tianqi, produced the first batch of lithium hydroxide from its new Kwinana refinery in Western Australia. At the beginning of this month, Australian mining behemoth BHP commissioned its Nickel West plant in Western Australia which will produce nickel sulfate, a key battery raw material…read more.
What P&G Said about Soaring Costs, Supply Chain Woes, Inflation, and Trying to Keep Shelves Stocked
Procter & Gamble [PG], which makes a broad range of consumer and health-care products, released its quarterly earnings today. Let me give you the short form: Sales up some, costs up a whole bunch, profits down.
The company said that in addition to the price increases announced since April, it would implement more price increases to deal with rising costs. In its outlook, it upped the hit to earnings per share from surging commodities costs and transportation woes.
CFO Andre Schulten explained how the company had to jump through hoops, trying to keep the shelves stocked, including by limiting how much some retailers can buy to prevent hoarding. He complained about driver shortages. “We do not anticipate any easing of costs,” he said.
In April, P&G announced the first batch of price increases “in the range of mid to high single-digits,” on baby care, feminine care, and adult incontinence products, to respond to surging commodity costs and transportation costs. Later, it announced price increases on its family care, home care, and fabric care products. Over the past few weeks, it announced to US retailers price increases on its grooming, skin care, and oral care products. It has been a flow of price increases.
“The degree of timing of these moves are very specific to the category, brand, and sometimes the product form within a brand,” Schulten told analysts at the conference call this morning.
The first price increases started to show up on the shelves in September, and were barely reflected in Q1 ended September 30.
So, for the quarter ended September 30 (Q1 of its fiscal year 2022), P&G reported this morning, compared to Q1 a year ago, in a demonstration of how inflation bites (bold):
- Sales: +5%
- Costs of products sold: +13%
- So, gross profit: -2%
- Selling and admin expenses: +1%
- Operating income: -5%
- But interest expenses fell and income taxes fell
- Net earnings: -4%.
That 5% sales increase was a result of, well, mostly unrelated to selling more:
- Actual increase in volume: +2%
- Foreign exchange: +1%
- Price increases, which just started taking effect in September: +1%
- Change in mix to costlier and premium products and to the Health Care business: +1%.
To billionaire investor Mark Cuban, bitcoin has a major edge over other cryptocurrencies.
It has “a HUGE advantage” in that it has “ZERO competition” as a store of value, Cuban tweeted on Saturday. Cuban even calls bitcoin “the best store of value on the market.”
In his opinion, that’s due to its algorithmic scarcity, which makes bitcoin limited in supply by design. Because of this, Cuban sees bitcoin as an asset that will appreciate as demand increases. He has previously compared it to gold, even saying that bitcoin is a better store of value than gold.
The “Shark Tank” investor and Dallas Mavericks owner is so bullish on bitcoin that he predicts that it, along with Ethereum, will be viewed as “safe havens” in crypto in the future, meaning that bitcoin will be seen as an asset that will keep its value or grow in value, even when the overall crypto market faces turbulence.
But despite Cuban’s comments, keep in mind that financial experts generally consider cryptocurrency risky, volatile and speculative, and warn that investors should only invest what they can afford to lose…read more.
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