Plus: streaming subscriptions are soaring. December 8, 2025 Sign Up | View online IN THIS ISSUE 8 min read 👷 Building bummers 🍞 Price-fixing payouts 📺 Steep-priced streamers Real estate was a trap for Robin Williams in Jumanji (the Citizen Kane of kids’ movies) and it can ensnare entire countries, too. We explain below. | Sony Pictures Entertainment THE WEEK IN MARKETS Has Bitcoin finally lost its shine? After a rough November, the bounce-back kept bouncing last week — but we’re going to focus on the one exception: Bitcoin, which is now down 10% since the start of 2025, a year in which stocks are way up. It’s that last part — the widening divergence between Bitcoin and tech stocks — that has investors wondering whether Bitcoin has finally lost its shine. The questions around it are getting existential, as in: what even is Bitcoin? Historically it has traded like a tech stock, bought and sold by similar people with similar future outlooks. But it hasn’t been behaving like a tech stock lately. For some it was a sanctuary from currency debasement, like digital gold. But not anymore. So what’s going on? Bloomberg’s Merryn Somerset Webb says it could be just volatility as usual — or it could be the HODLers (“hold on for dear lifers”) who bought coins with a lot of borrowed money are finally staring down selling. That includes the one HODLer to rule them all, Strategy Inc.’s Michael Saylor, whose next move — to sell off or not to sell off — could determine Bitcoin’s fate from here. THE CHART OF THE WEEK Last week, Netflix announced it’ll buy Warner Bros.’ studios and the HBO Max streaming service for US$82.7 billion. If the deal goes through, Crave might lose its HBO content, which could challenge (to put it mildly) its ability to keep raising prices. FIVE INTERESTING THINGS LAST WEEK (AND ONE IMPORTANT REMINDER) Did Sam Altman order a code red on Gemini3? You’re g*d*mn right he did! In November, Google released its Gemini3 chatbot to rave reviews and strong accuracy ratings. User growth exploded — which startled industry leader OpenAI so much that CEO Sam Altman issued a company-wide “code red” directive to improve ChatGPT 5.1, the widely panned update to its flagship product. Cue the frantic reshuffling of teams, the mothballing of projects, and the launch of daily check-in calls with the boss himself. Good news jobs-wise! Canada’s unemployment rate fell to 6.5% in November, the third straight month of big job gains and a sign that the economy is weathering the trade war better than expected. Bad news housing-wise! A new report finds that Build Canada Homes — the much-ballyhooed new federal agency that Prime Minister Mark Carney has tasked with ramping up construction — is on track to build only about 5,000 units a year, just a wee bit shy of its 500,000-unit annual goal. Canada’s FIFA Men’s World Cup group draw isn’t so scary — yet. Our men’s national team (FIFA rank: 27) will compete in Group B next summer along with Switzerland (17), Qatar (51), and the winner of “European Playoff A,” which includes Wales (32), Northern Ireland (69), Bosnia and Herzegovina (71), and … Italy (12). Eek. At least we’ll have home-field advantage. U.S. regulators throw cold water on the ETF rager. The U.S. SEC blocked nine firms from launching new ultra-ultra-leveraged ETFs for fear they were too risky. It’s a curious milestone for ETFs, which were created in the ’90s to help investors diversify, aka de-risk. But these days, highly leveraged ETFs are among the most perilous assets in U.S. or Canadian markets: they amplify the daily ups (or downs 💀) of an underlying fund by 2x or 3x. DIY traders have been piling in, and last week was the first sign that regulators — who nixed what would have been the U.S.’s first 5x ETFs — think the party has perhaps gotten out of hand. REMINDER: Don’t forget to claim your free bread ! The deadline to claim your slice of the $500-million bread-price-fixing class-action settlement is Dec. 12. If you bought packaged bread from one of Canada’s major grocery stores between 2001 and 2021 , you’re eligible. The opposite of sour dough! —Claire Porter Robbins FROM OUR SPONSOR THE FOMO INDEX by Stacey Woods IMPORTANT ✒️ Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year is “rage bait.” Hey, Oxford, it’s word of the year, not phrase of the year, dammit! Source 😀 U.S. beats Canada in new ranking of most generous countries. Or perhaps Canada was just generous enough to let the U.S. go first. Source 🏒 New Canadian gay hockey romance, Heated Rivalry, is blowing up on HBO Max. Activists hope it’ll help change the stigma around hockey. Source 🎶 This year’s Spotify Wrapped embraces a pre-internet aesthetic. Too bad its royalties don’t embrace a pre-streaming aesthetic. Source CRASH & BURN TO THE MOON 🍒 Ocean Spray looking into unusual complaint that cranberry sauce cans are filled with water. Usual complaint is that they’re filled with cranberry sauce. Source 🥒 California town votes to make pickleball a crime. Offenders will be sentenced to a good, swift paddling. Source 🛷 NORAD launches its Santa Tracker. Christmas Eve will be filled with cries of “Not that way, you idiot!” and “Can we still add some Cokes?” Source 🧬 DNA reveals that 10,500-year-old wad of “gum” was chewed by teenage girl. More testing needed to determine if she was rolling her eyes at the time. Source WHO CARES THE BIG IMPORTANT STORY Q&A How Canada, and Much of the World, Got Stuck in a Land Trap If you’re a first-time homebuyer, it’s easy to feel as if the entire system is rigged against you. Housing prices keep rising, wages have stagnated, and new construction has proved maddeningly slow. How did housing in a place like Canada, with a small population and an abundance of land, reach crisis levels? Mike Bird, the Wall Street editor for The Economist and author of The Land Trap: A New History of the World’s Oldest Asset, has answers. Let’s start broad: why is land unlike any other financial asset? Every other asset in the world depreciates, rapidly or slowly. Houses fall down. Bridges collapse. Ideas become irrelevant. This isn’t true for land. There’s no innovative element to its value; instead, most of its value is maintained by economic activity happening around it. If you buy it and that activity continues, there’s no reason it can’t stay valuable. So land appreciates, but it’s a nonproductive asset. Yet you make an interesting point in your book that land has, in some respects, helped to spur economic activity. Explain that. A lot of what we think of as small-business lending in most of the world is actually mortgage lending. Loans are secured against an entrepreneur’s residence. In a world with no homeownership, it’s difficult to imagine the vast majority of small businesses having access to credit at all. But there’s more to the story: your book argues that, in the long run, soaring land prices can damage an economy. How so? If people can’t afford land, they often don’t have collateral to borrow capital. So an entrepreneur with a good idea may never get a chance to fund their business. Then, over time, as land prices soar higher, banks slowly become mortgage originators and do far, far less business lending because land is seen as safer. Then the corporate side atrophies. This is the thesis of your book: land is a trap because it often outcompetes other assets and sucks capital from more productive areas. This sounds like the Canadian story. Right. The U.S. has a robust venture-capital and private-equity infrastructure, so young companies have a way to secure funding outside of banks. But in Canada, you don’t have as much of that. In Canada and elsewhere, all sorts of policies and tax incentives make land an overly attractive investment. You propose ending such measures to alleviate the land trap. The trouble is that many ordinary people rely on their homes to finance their retirement. How do you end these policies without screwing them over? There’s a huge merit argument for taxing land more extensively to discourage speculation and to make land a less attractive asset. But you can’t tell people for decades that homeownership is the path to security, as many governments have, and then turn around and say, “Now we’re going to rinse you for it.” These homeowners haven’t done anything wrong. This is why it’s really tough to reform land policies. You write about how Singapore has avoided many aspects of the land trap. What did it do? Singapore’s early leaders wanted businesses to thrive; they didn’t want all investment to flow to real estate. So the government bought about 90% of the land and provided quality, low-cost public housing to millions of citizens. If you’re a citizen, you buy a 99-year lease for a flat, and you can only buy one. And noncitizens are severely restricted from buying property. This approach caps prices, and it has helped Singapore build a low-tax, freewheeling free-market system that doesn’t disadvantage people or businesses. This interview, which was edited for length and clarity, was conducted by Brennan Doherty. SPEAKING OF LAND… Are the suburbs really so awful? Depends! Dan Wang, an analyst who’s fintwit famous for his annual letters on China, went on Tyler Cowen’s podcast to discuss his new book, Breakneck. It’s a compelling conversation: Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason, challenges Wang’s view that the West is failing because it’s not investing tons in infrastructure, arguing that our quality health care and pleasant suburbs make up for it. Give it a listen if you like wonkish debates: Apple Spotify YouTube. POSTS OF WISDOM Our aesthetic goals for 2026… 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), Mohini Tailor (lifecycle marketing manager), Eva Grace Clement Cruz (lifecycle marketing associate), Setareh Sarmadi (senior editorial producer), Matthew Karasz (markets editor), Jared Sullivan (senior editor), Peter Martin (senior editor), and Devin Friedman (editor-in-chief). Disclosures: Contributors to this newsletter own shares in Google. Wealthsimple Media Inc. 80 Spadina Ave Suite 400 Toronto, ON, M5V 2J4 Have questions? Contact us. 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