Plus: Why, in pro baseball, the owners always win April 11, 2022 Made in Canada BUSINESS NEWS MADE SIMPLE IN THIS ISSUE ⚾️ Baseball's back 🐷 Prolific pigs 🏦 Bank earnings 🦄 A unicorn stumbles WHAT'S UP THIS WEEK Barack hits Netflix, banks give us numbers, and, of course, inflation Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash MONDAY April 11 Nearly every major American bank – Morgan Stanley, CitiGroup, JP Morgan Chase – is scheduled to release Q2 earnings reports this week. Why does that matter? Bank earnings move markets a lot, since bank profitability affects lending. More profits, more lending. Less profits, less lending. And lending drives the economy. Bank stocks have been booming so far in 2022, despite, well, everything. But we'll see what happens. Fingers crossed! TUESDAY April 12 Fresh U.S. inflation numbers will give us a first look at how much consumer prices rose through March. Inflation in the States hit a painful 7.9% in February. Forecasters expect that number to rise to a more eye-watering 8.3% – 8.5%. Markets will rise if it's less. (We're not holding our breath.) Speaking of inflation... WEDNESDAY April 13 The Bank of Canada will announce changes to interest rates, to cool the economy and bring down — you guessed it — inflation, which hit a 30-year-high of 5.7% in February. (Hey, it could be worse; look at the U.S.) A half-point jump is expected. Barack Obama beat the Republicans, twice. Now he's coming for Ken Burns. On Wednesday, the president turned Netflix mega-producer will debut his new big-budget docu-series "Our Great National Parks," a survey of public spaces worldwide, which gives Netflix another shiny new object in the streaming wars. THE FOMO INDEX IMPORTANT 📉 Russia reportedly has a 99% of defaulting on its loans within a year. Which offically gives it a lower credit rating than your bankrupt uncle Rusty. 💸 A hacker who stole $52M in Cashio stablecoin is allowing victims to apply for refunds — provided they justify why they need their money back. ⛽️ Little but bold Lithuania becomes the first EU nation to ditch Russian gas. 🙌 The government is giving low-income Canadian families high-speed internet for $20/month. CRASH & BURN 🤑 TO THE MOON ✈️ Flair, the "Canadian" airline, might lose its licence for not being so Canadian after all. 🎤 Kanye pulls out of Coachella. Will Pete Davidson have something to say about it...? 🙃 Canada’s unemployment rate hits lowest levels since ’76! The catch: a tight job market gives the BoC room to keep raising interest rates. ✍️ Twitter finally announced it's testing an edit function, only 16 years after people started asking for one. WHO CARES Top left: Russia, Hacker, top right: Internet, Lithuania, bottom left: Flair, Kanye, bottom right: Twitter, Employment THE BIG IMPORTANT STORY Baseball and money Why, in Pro Baseball, the Owners Always Win Baseball is back! Right on time, plus or minus a week! After a lockout that kept Major League Baseball on ice all winter and delayed Opening Day, the owners and the players' union finally agreed on a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) that fundamentally alters…not much. But not much in interesting ways. First: Who won? Who lost? The owners won. The owners always win. Come on. They didn't get their long-lusted-after salary cap, but that was never going to happen. What they did get was advertising on jerseys and helmets, which helped raise the value of the average MLB team to $2.07 billion USD, which is not terribly far behind the NBA average of $2.58 billion USD. (NFL: $3.4b) The richest players will get richer, so they also won. But not really because of the CBA: to discourage obscene spending, the new deal adds a special tier to the existing luxury tax when a team's payroll tops $290 million USD. Will the tax make things fairer? Doubtful. Hedge-fund guy Steve Cohen, the newish owner of the Mets, is paying his side ace, Max Scherzer, more than 13 other teams are paying their entire rosters. So Cohen is not going to let some dumb luxury tax stop him from driving up the price of stars. Let's skip the middle 98% of the league. They got basically nothing. The bottom 1%, though — rookies and young players — scored a little something. Let's call it the Vlad Guerrero Rule, meant to resolve the injustice that the Blue Jays' MVP runner-up was reportedly worth $53.5 million USD, but Toronto only had to pay him $605,400. To correct this, the CBA establishes an annual US$50-million bonus pool for the 100 best young players. OK, so what? No players' union in sports is more powerful than MLB's, and yet the players got trucked at the negotiating table. Or did they? Tom Brady would play for the Jets if it got rid of the NFL's salary cap. (He wouldn't, but you get the point.) Arguably, any MLB negotiation that ends without a salary cap is a win — at least for the superstars. Baseball's lowest-paid players, on the other hand, are lower-paid than the other leagues' lowliest, and there are a lot of them. But baseball isn't a democracy. The richest players tend to represent the union at the negotiating table, and they chose the status quo. Which helps the owners, who don't want to pay young players more than they have to. And, until that dynamic changes, MLB salaries won't much either. WHAT ELSE HAPPENED LAST WEEK Feral hogs, the federal budget, and one cringey crypto bull Photo by Eva Blue on Unsplash IMPORTANT The federal budget came out Thursday. What's in it? For starters: billions in innovation funding, a dental-care program for kids 12 and younger, more support for Ukraine. And, oh yeah, new housing policies: The world's hottest housing market — aka Canada's — has reached such absurd heights that the Trudeau government announced a two-year ban on foreign homebuyers as part of the federal budget, plus a plan to create savings accounts for first-time homebuyers. Toronto home prices dipped 2.6% in March, mostly thanks to rising interest rates. So maybe, just maybe, the housing nightmare is becoming a teensy bit less nightmarish? INTERESTING Quick-checkout startup Fast was not only terrible at picking an SEO-friendly business name, it was also really bad at making money. In 2021, the VC-backed company, which made one-click checkout software, spent up to $10 million USD a month — to generate $50,000. Well, shocker, Fast is shutting down, securing its place in the Failed Unicorn Hall of Fame. Feral hogs are wreaking such havoc on Canada's farmlands that Alberta has issued a $75 bounty per pig, to limit costly crop damage. And that adds up quick if you bag 10–15 hogs a night like one farmer. The catch? Some swine are digging "pigloos" to survive. Good luck... Melvin Capital, the hedge fund that famously bet against GameStop and got short squeezed by r/WallStreetBets to the tune of $7 billion USD, managed to lose 20.6% in its first quarter this year, marking its third straight month of hefty losses. That's noteworthy because 1) Wow, that's a monster drop. 2) Redditors are pretty pumped about the whole thing. Ethereum guy/style icon Vitalik Buterin revealed on Twitter that he doesn't drink "alcohol stuff" often. But when he does, he prefers — because who doesn't? — a mix of green tea and red wine, "(~85 / 15 ratio)." Good memeage ensued. The crypto-thirsty city of Miami is now home to a 3,000-pound, laser-eyed charging bull, à la the one on Wall Street, and it's, uh, quite something. TOTALLY NONESSENTAL GOOD READS A bitcoin bust, two buddies beat Amazon, and a plea for more PTO 💪 How two best friends beat Amazon The New York Times 🤢 How TikTok heartthrob William White's thirsty fandom turned toxic Input 🏝 Out of Office: The case for more paid vacation days The Walrus 🚨 Inside the bitcoin bust that took down the web's biggest child abuse site Wired THE WISDOM OF TWITTER When the KGB wants to see your browsing history, but The Ultimatum just dropped on Netflix... THOUGHTS ON TODAY'S ISSUE? 🤑 Love it 🙂 Good 🙁 So so Leave us more feedback TODAY'S NEWSLETTER CONTRIBUTORS 🤖 Sarah Rieger News Writer 🤠 J.R. Sullivan Senior Editor 🚠 Steve Frank Senior Editor 😬 Kat Angus Magaging Editor 😝 Jared Lindzon Writer 🤓 Devin Gordon Writer Full disclosure: contributors to this newsletter own stock in Amazon, J.P. 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