Timeline: All the twists and turns from Couche-Tard's push to buy 7-Eleven's owner
The Laval, Que.-based business behind Circle K and Ingo has not had an easy time pursuing the acquisition of Japan-headquartered Seven & i Holdings Co. Ltd.
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CTV News
19 hours ago
- CTV News
U.S.-EU trade deal raises questions of how Canada will fair as deadline looms
Watch Japan and the EU have now inked trade deals with the U.S., but how will Canada fair as Trump's deadline looms? CTV's Jeremie Charron has more.
CTV News
2 days ago
- CTV News
Trump says Japan will invest US$550 billion in U.S. at his direction. It may not be a sure thing
A staff member distributes an extra edition of the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper reporting that President Donald Trump announced a trade framework with Japan on Tuesday, Wednesday, July 23, 2025, in Tokyo. The headline reads "U.S., a 15% tax on goods imported from Japan." (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko) WASHINGTON — U.S. President Donald Trump is bragging that Japan has given him, as part of a new trade framework, US$550 billion to invest in the United States. It's an astonishing figure, but still subject to negotiation and perhaps not the sure thing he's portraying. 'Japan is putting up $550 billion in order to lower their tariffs a little bit,' Trump said Thursday. 'They put up, as you could call it, seed money. Let's call it seed money.' He said 90 per cent of any profits from the money invested would go to the U.S. even if Japan had put up the funds. 'It's not a loan or anything, it's a signing bonus,' the Republican president said, on the trade framework that lowered his threatened tariff from 25 per cent to 15 per cent, including on autos. A White House official said the terms are being negotiated and nothing has been formalized in writing. The official, who insisted on anonymity to detail the terms of the talks, suggested the goal was for the $550 billion fund to make investments at Trump's direction. The sum is significant: It would represent more than 10 per cent of Japan's entire gross domestic product. The Japan External Trade Organization estimates that direct investment into the U.S. economy topped $780 billion in 2023. It is unclear the degree to which the $550 billion could represent new investment or flow into existing investment plans. What the trade framework announced Tuesday has achieved is a major talking point for the Trump administration. The president has claimed to have brought trillions of dollars in new investment into the U.S., though the impact of those commitments have yet to appear in the economic data for jobs, construction spending or manufacturing output. The framework also enabled Trump to say other countries are agreeing to have their goods taxed, even if some of the cost of those taxes are ultimately passed along to U.S. consumers. On the $550 billion, Japan's Cabinet Office said it involves the credit facility of state-affiliated financial institutions, such as Japan Bank for International Cooperation. Further details would be decided based on the progress of the investment deals. Japanese trade negotiator Ryosei Akazawa, upon returning to Japan, did not discuss the terms of the $550 billion investment. Akazawa said he believes a written joint statement is necessary, at least on working levels, to avoid differences. He is not thinking about a legally binding trade pact. The U.S. apparently released its version of the deal while Japanese officials were on their return flight home. 'If we find differences of understanding, we may have to point them out and say 'that's not what we discussed,'' Akazawa said. The U.S. administration said the fund would be invested in critical minerals, pharmaceuticals, computer chips and shipbuilding, among other industries. It has said Japan will also buy 100 airplanes from Boeing and rice from U.S. farmers as part of the framework, which Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said would be evaluated every three months. 'And if the president is unhappy, then they will boomerang back to the 25 per cent tariff rates, both on cars and the rest of their products. And I can tell you that I think at 25, especially in cars, the Japanese economy doesn't work,' Bessent told Fox News' 'The Ingraham Angle.' Akazawa denied that Bessent's quarterly review was part of the negotiations. 'In my past eight trips to the United States during which I held talks with the president and the ministers,' Akazawa said. 'I have no recollection of discussing how we ensure the implementation of the latest agreement between Japan and the United States.' He said it would cause major disruptions to the economy and administrative processes if the rates first rise to 25 per cent as scheduled on Aug. 1 and then drop to 15 per cent. 'We definitely want to avoid that and I believe that is the understanding shared by the U.S. side,' he said. On buying U.S. rice, Japanese officials have said they have no plans to raise the current 770,000-ton 'minimum access' cap to import more from America. Agricultural Minister Shinjiro Koizumi said Japan will decide whether to increase U.S. rice imports and that Japan is not committed to a fixed quota. Trump's commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, has suggested that the Japanese agreement is putting pressure on other countries such as South Korea to strike deals with the U.S. Trump, who is traveling in Scotland, plans to meet on Sundayv with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to discuss trade. 'Whatever Donald Trump wants to build, the Japanese will finance it for him,' Lutnick said Thursday on CNBC. 'Pretty amazing.' Yamaguchi reported from Tokyo. Josh Boak And Mari Yamaguchi, The Associated Press
Globe and Mail
2 days ago
- Globe and Mail
The stock market is booming. Our economies are busting. What's going on?
John Rapley is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail. He is an author and academic whose books include Why Empires Fall and Twilight of the Money Gods. Stock markets are probing fresh heights. Among the G7 economies, only Italy's isn't in record territory and even Japan, which looked to have entered terminal decline after its 1990 crash, is now back within touching distance of those long-ago highs. House prices as well are near their all-time highs in most places, slightly off their recent peaks but still far above where they ever were before. And that's nothing compared with crypto and gold – bitcoin is up more than a quarter this year, gold nearly a third. In short, we're getting richer by the day. Which is kind of strange, because our economies are barely moving. Of the major economies, only the United States has shown any significant expansion recently and even that is now slowing rapidly. Reflecting this new deceleration, the corporate-earnings season now under way in the United States is turning out to be a dud, with profit growth coming in well below the rate of share-price increases. In short, the strength of market rallies doesn't reflect what's happening in economies, which are weak and getting weaker. So what's going on? Some of it is rebalancing. Talk of all-time highs in the U.S. stock market cloud the reality – the U.S. is the laggard, it's stock market up a mere 5 per cent since President Donald Trump took office and 8 per cent for the year, a far cry from Germany's 22 per cent or Hong Kong's 28 per cent. Currency effects make the discrepancy even more dramatic, leaving the U.S. market down in euro and peso terms, and pretty much flat in Canadian dollars. Lofty U.S. stock valuations bank on tech-heavy market's earnings strength For years the U.S. stock market sucked the air out of the world's markets. At its peak, it accounted for more than half of the world's publicly traded capital, the Magnificent Seven tech stocks alone having a combined value bigger than any other stock market on the planet. But now, money has begun returning home. That explains the weakening of the dollar. Given how much smaller than the U.S. these markets are, flows of this scale have an outsized impact on prices. As a result, the laggards of the past decade, such as Spain, Hong Kong, South Africa and Britain, have become winners, with a small share of repatriated investment making for big rallies. This rebalancing was always bound to happen at some point, but Mr. Trump's policies are accelerating it. Though presenting the trade 'deals' he's now rolling out as wins, because other countries have to 'pay' higher tariffs than the U.S., it's an odd victory when your consumers must pay more for their goods than foreigners. After Mr. Trump announced his trade deal with Japan this week, Toyota's share price shot up 15 per cent, but Ford's barely budged. That's because the price of a Toyota car will increase by 15 per cent, but Ford's will probably rise more, since the company must pay tariffs on all its inputs. The same is happening in bond markets, where the spread between U.S. government bonds and those of other countries, especially emerging markets, is narrowing. As the U.S. looks less investable, other countries lure capital back away from it. To this reallocation of investment one can add the massive amount of stimulus now entering the global pipeline – the tax cuts in Mr. Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, Germany's big stimulus program, NATO's rearmament, Japan's fiscal loosening: There's a lot of bond issuance coming, which will pump money into the world economy. The monetary tightening that had followed the 2021-22 inflation spike has now given way to an increase in global money supply that's running at an annual rate of more than 7 per cent. Opinion: The triple contradiction of Trumponomics could crash the world economy But what's good for markets isn't necessarily good for the economy. In the U.S., first-time homebuyers are spending a higher share of their income on mortgage payments today than they were before the 2008 crash, leaving less to spend or invest on other things, while squeezing future demand. The same is happening in Canada, and as we know one consequence of the rising cost of living is that voters are demanding a reduction in immigration. If voters don't always favour the harsh measures being taken against immigrants in the U.S., nonetheless virtually all Western countries are starting to clamp down on inflows. That is cutting off one of the few remaining sources of growth in Western economies, namely the rise in labour supply. Sooner or later, in short, markets will realign with the economy. Unless the latter picks up, the former are sure to fall. At the moment, a slowdown looks the more likely scenario. Whatever stimulus effects come from government's fiscal largesse, the impact of tariffs and slow growth in the labour market owing to immigration cutbacks will drag down growth. Investors are still pricing shares as if the good days will keep rolling. But this fall may bring a chill to markets.
