Plus why AI probably won’t take your job March 16, 2026 Sign Up | View online In This Issue 8 min read 🖐️ Pricey palm oil 🐫 Camel pageants 🤖 Labour pains We spent the week like Daniel Plainview — watching bonfires of oil blacken the skies over the Persian Gulf. Now the economic fallout is spreading, too. | Paramount Pictures The Week in Markets ’Twas the month before the COVID shutdown… Even through t he fog of war, this much is clear: last week’s news was bad, this week’s news will be bad, and next week’s probably will be, too. None of the war’s three principal combatants — the U.S., Israel, and Iran — appear to be backing down. Crude oil is back over US$100/barrel, prices on oil-derived products are shooting up (see below), and interest rates are rising again as investors bet on central banks hedging against inflation. What we’re not seeing from investors — yet — is panic. The major global markets have been battered, but they’re not in free fall. As one finance pundit observed, it’s all eerily reminiscent of February 2020, when we saw the domino effect of COVID disruptions but the markets were shrugging it off. Investors seem to be betting that the Iran War is a massive but temporary disruption, and that when it’s behind us in, say, six to nine months, the market’s AI-powered tailwinds will still be gusting. Call it patience, or call it complacency — we’ll find out soon enough. TSX: -0.54% (+2.07% YTD) S&P 500: -0.64% (-3.30% YTD) The Chart of the Week What Happened Last Week Important More cracks in the private-credit dam. It’s the 2020s’ sexiest new asset class: you invest in a non-bank fund (like a hedge fund or private equity), they pool the money and make loans, and you make a sweet (as in +10% per year) yield. The catch is that if everyone wants their money back all at once, you might have to wait; you’re trading liquidity for return. But the $1.8-trillion sector has been spooked by a handful of high-profile firms capping withdrawals after surges in redemption requests, and last week two more joined the list, BlackRock and Cliffwater. The question facing investors: are these isolated cases, or are they subprime mortgage lenders in 2007? The app-stinence economy is booming. Last week’s revelation that Quittr — an app designed to help men quit visiting so many websites with “hub” in the name — failed to protect intimate user data was unsurprising if you’d read the recent New York Mag profile of its manosphere-y Gen Z founders. What did surprise us? Quittr’s rapid growth (1.5 million downloads in just 18 months) and the booming market for digital-detox tools — like Brick, Freedom, and the minimalist Light Phone — that promise to liberate us from our devices. Turns out people will pay serious money to get online and to log off. Interesting The Lundin family made one big bet on gold in 2024. Now they’re billionaires. Meet the Lundins, Canada’s newest members of the Bloomberg Billionaire Index thanks to a single $17.5M investment — less than two years ago — used to open a gold mine in Côte d’Ivoire that has since generated a 1,994% return. This saga from Bloomberg is worth reading in full because it illustrates just how massive the gold rush has become. And also because we skipped past some of its more, uh, colourful details: Patriarch Adolf left Sweden to become a wildcatter in apartheid-era South Africa. —Claire Porter Robbins From Our Sponsor The FOMO Index by Stacey Woods Important ♻️ New study finds Quebecers are dumping recyclables straight into nature, or as they call it, “The St. Lawrence bin.” Source 🤖 Meta acquires Moltbook. AI agents fear their platform will be overrun with Boomer bots wishing everyone happy birthday in all caps. Source 📱 Federal government will allow TikTok to continue. Nation may never know how close it came to looking up once in a while. Source 📫 Conservatives want to make it easier to mail alcohol across Canada. So, ideally, when you go out to meet your weed-delivery guy, there’ll be beer in the mailbox. Source Crash & Burn To the Moon 🐫 Twenty camels were disqualified from beauty pageant for use of hump-enhancing injectables. Not surprising given today’s impossible hump standards. Source 🍸 Buffalo Wild Wings debuts a wing-flavoured protein espresso martini. That and a side of fibremaxxed colostrum ranch and you’re good for the day. Source 👞 Trump is giving all men in his cabinet Florsheim shoes. “Cool, we’ll move their applications to the top of the pile,” says manager of Florsheim shoes. Source 🏃🏻‍♀️ Fredericton woman likely just set new world record for stroller racing. World definitely just set new world record for people who’ve heard of stroller racing. Source Who Cares? The Big Important Story What if Automation Turns Out to Be a Job Creator? Our favourite type of economics journalist is a savant of simplicity — someone who can look at a giant pile of nebulous data and turn it into a coherent story about how things actually work. That definitely describes Greg Ip, The Wall Street Journal’s chief economics commentator (and prodigal son of Peterborough, Ontario!), who keeps churning out fascinating columns about the precarious state of modern labour, including a sobering look at how corporate profits since 1980 have increasingly flowed to capital rather than workers — more dividends, less hiring. He also made a persuasive historical case that AI won’t be the job killer we’re fearing, and before we exhaled too much, we wanted to hear more about why. What got you thinking about the capital versus labour piece? A statistic about how Nvidia had 30,000 employees, which is a tiny number of people for a company worth over $4 trillion. I was just blown away that the most valuable company in the history of mankind could have such a small payroll. So much wealth creation and economic growth right now is being powered by companies that just don’t use very many people. The growth we’re seeing is extremely favourable to capital and less so for labour. What’s your sense on how Canada compares? I’m reluctant to comment with just a quick look, but the data tells me the share of profits to labour in Canada declined steadily, like in the United States, from the early 1980s until around 2005. But it’s been fairly stable ever since. The trend has been much less pronounced in Canada. Why is that? For one, having lived in the United States for a long time now, I would say that American companies and Americans in general are just more adventurous and willing to take chances. So when a new technology comes along, Americans will try it out before other people, like in Europe or Canada. What do you make of the recent spate of takes that white-collar jobs are disappearing? There’s legitimacy to this fear that AI will make it even harder for labour to get ahead, because you’re always competing against some automated version of what you can do. But I am doubtful that this trend would be so big that you’d end up essentially annihilating labour in general. And there are two reasons. First, people have been making these kinds of predictions about automation for years, like John Maynard Keynes said in the 1930s, and it never happened. Automation makes us more productive and it makes things we produce cheaper, so people consume more and they have more money left over and they buy other things. The second thing is that when something gets cheaper, like AI, we find new uses for it. For example, when GPS came along, you would have thought that was going to put all the taxi drivers out of work. But it turns out that it became so easy to become a taxi driver that we got Uber and we got Lyft and people take more taxi rides than ever. Google Translate came along in 2006 and we have 73% more translators today than we did back then. Labour, broadly speaking, has been resilient. Individual jobs, less so. A lot of people in my circle of associates feel very vulnerable to AI. This must be how people in blue-collar communities felt 40 years ago, but their voices were not being heard because they didn’t have access to all the lawyers and journalists and economists and so on. Part of me wonders whether that feeling of being displaced today is specific to the people who are being affected. —Claire Porter Robbins The Big Read 🐷 How AI Peppa Pig Saved Hasbro’s Bacon Toys and board games gathering dust while kids get iPads before they can walk sounds like the plot of Toy Story 5 — in fact, it is the plot of Toy Story 5. And yet Hasbro, one of the world’s iconic IRL toymakers, is still going strong. CEO Chris Cocks sat down with Decoder’s Nilay Patel to explain how. Best trade secret: they use an AI version of Peppa Pig to help co-design new Peppa products, and an AI Optimus Prime for new Transformers. Cue that theme music! | The Verge Post of Wisdom Thoughts on Today’s Issue? Love it Good So so This week’s newsletter contributors: Brennan Doherty (writer), Devin Gordon (writer), Claire Porter Robbins (writer), Stacey Woods (writer), Ambrose Martos (fact checker), Ciara Rickard (copy editor), Maude Campbell (copy editor), Sara Black McCulloch (fact checker), Eva Grace Clement Cruz (specialist, product engagement), Setareh Sarmadi (senior editorial producer), Matthew Karasz (markets editor), Jared Sullivan (senior editor), Peter Martin (senior editor), and Devin Friedman (editor-in-chief). TWIM: Total returns shown in local currency, via TradingView. Wealthsimple Media Inc. 80 Spadina Ave Suite 400 Toronto, ON, M5V 2J4 Have questions? Contact us. VIEW IN BROWSER PRIVACY POLICY UNSUBSCRIBE Match: From January 13 - March 31, 2026, new or existing Wealthsimple account user who registers for the promotion then initiates an institutional transfer of an existing account from a qualifying third party to a Wealthsimple Self-directed Investing, Managed Investing, Crypto, or Chequing account will receive a 1%, 2% or 3% Match Bonus of the cumulative transferred amount (less withdrawal) during the promotion period. Transfers must be received on or before June 29, 2026. Maximum 1 Bonus per client. Minimum fund holding period required. Must be residents of Canada and age of majority. See full T&Cs at wsim.co/unrealdeal. TLDR is offered by Wealthsimple Media Inc. and is for informational purposes only. Any views expressed are those of the individual author and/or of Wealthsimple Media Inc., not of Wealthsimple Financial Corp or any of its other subsidiaries or affiliates. The content in TLDR is not investment advice, a recommendation to buy or sell assets or securities, nor any other kind of professional advice. TLDR is not a research report and should not serve as the basis for making investment decisions. Wealthsimple Media Inc. does not endorse any third-party views referenced in this content. When you invest, your money is at risk and it is possible that you may lose some or all of your investment. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Historical returns, hypothetical returns, expected returns and images included in this content are for illustrative purposes only. Always research before investing. © 2026 Wealthsimple Media Inc.