PrefBlog

It seems to me that this here internet thingamajig might be useful for business:

Home renovation chain Rona says its efforts to attract tech-savvy shoppers got a recent boost when the retailer temporarily replaced its printed flyer with an expanded digital offering.

The Montreal-based company says sales doubled at its stores across Canada despite scrapping the printed flyer during a nationwide test one week in February.
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Jean Coutu, one of Canada’s largest pharmacy networks, said it’s also seeing success with its digital efforts. The company said cosmetic sales got a five per cent lift after it twice published a 20-page digital flyer this year enhanced with videos on the Montreal La Presse Plus tablet and website.

How about that new Brookfield infrastructure fund, eh?:

Brookfield Asset Management Inc. (“Brookfield”) (NYSE: BAM, TSX: BAM.A, Euronext: BAMA) announced today that it held the final close on Brookfield Infrastructure Fund III (“BIF III” or the “Fund”) with an aggregate of $14 billion of equity commitments, creating a global infrastructure fund that invests in high-quality, core infrastructure assets on a value basis.

BIF III marks the largest private fund raised by Brookfield and the largest private infrastructure fund ever raised in the industry. In the last 18 months, Brookfield has raised approximately $27 billion across its flagship private fund strategies, including the close of its flagship real estate fund, Brookfield Strategic Real Estate Partners II at $9 billion, and its flagship private equity fund, Brookfield Capital Partners IV at $4 billion. All three funds surpassed their fundraising targets.

To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction:

As recreational and commercially available drones become more advanced, areas that are off limits are having to develop plans to keep drones out. Other than taking a rifle and shooting one down, there really aren’t many options on the market to keep drones away from places like prisons, military bases, and other restricted air spaces. Dedrone is a company seeking to bridge that market gap by creating a drone detection and jamming system. Using an array of sensors, lasers, and jammers, the Dedrone system will detect when a malicious drone enters designated airspace and automatically take defensive action.

There’s a causal link between Brexit and the commercial property chaos:

Some commercial property buyers are invoking “Brexit clauses” written into contracts agreed before Britain voted to leave the European Union, allowing them to walk away from the deals.

In other cases buyers have yet to exercise such get-out clauses but are keeping the option open to try to renegotiate the price down, according to property lawyers and managers.

A third group is playing for time in the hope that the effect of the June 23 referendum result on values becomes clearer, they say.

Jobs, jobs, jobs!

America’s job market stirred to life in June as payroll growth accelerated by the most since October after a two-month lull, assuaging fears of broader cutbacks by companies.

Payrolls climbed by 287,000 last month, exceeding the highest estimate in a Bloomberg survey, after a revised 11,000 gain in May, a Labor Department report showed Friday. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey called for a 180,000 increase. The jobless rate rose to 4.9 percent as more people entered the labor force. Wages advanced less than projected.
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Wages improved modestly, with average hourly earnings climbing 0.1 percent from a month earlier. The year-over-year increase was 2.6 percent, less than the 2.7 percent median forecast.

The average work week for all workers held at 34.4 hours in June.

In Canada, not so much:

Canada’s unemployment rate dipped slightly in June, despite a sharp drop in full-time jobs and other evidence of a weak month for hiring, as the number of people actively participating in the labour force declined.

Statistics Canada’s monthly Labour Force Survey showed that the unemployment rate fell to 6.8 per cent in June from 6.9 per cent in May, even though employment actually slipped a thin 700 jobs in the month – an essentially flat reading in a survey that has a statistical margin of error of plus or minus 29,500 each month. The lower unemployment rate was the result of a dip in the participation rate – the percentage of the working-age population that is either working or actively seeking work – to 65.5 per cent from 65.7 per cent, marking a 16-year low.

Bloomberg has a good piece on the power of Big Taxi in Vancouver:

On the face of it, Uber and Vancouver seem like a match made in ride-sharing heaven. Canada’s third-largest metropolis bills itself as Silicon Valley North—home to local unicorn Hootsuite and a thriving tech scene that employs thousands of young people. Public transportation is spotty, there are half as many taxis per 1,000 people as in Toronto, and the sprawling city of 2.5 million suffers from the nation’s worst traffic. In May, the website Vancity Buzz (now Daily Hive) reported that arriving cruise-ship passengers waited 90 minutes to catch a cab, forming a line 600 feet long. Vancouver seems purpose-built for ride-sharing.
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Vancouver is something of an outlier in Canada. Uber has operated in Toronto since 2012, despite a regulatory debate raging over its legality. Earlier this year, Canada’s largest city passed new rules for ride-hailing apps, slightly raising the base fare for an Uber ride and letting traditional taxis charge surge pricing for rides booked through apps. Uber, which has more than 400,000 regular users in Toronto, welcomed the rules while taxi representatives grumbled. In Quebec, Uber has 450,000 users, mostly in Montreal. The province’s transportation minister has been critical of the company, but put off passing a bill last month that would have required drivers to obtain taxi licenses in favor of more consultation.

Critics say British Columbia’s government is bowing to Vancouver’s powerful taxi industry. Kulwant Sahota, president of Yellow Cab Co. and the Vancouver Taxi Association, says Uber will provide unfair competition for cabbies at a time when the cost of living has soared. It’s a message the industry has hammered hard. “The taxi lobby has been very successful,” says Gillen, who adds that industry representatives often attend fundraisers for the ruling Liberal party.

Oh, well, they can get left behind if they want to. It’s good news for Toronto!

The Canadian Securities Administrators recently issued a notice regarding T+2 settlement:

Staff of the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA Staff or we) are publishing this notice to increase awareness and summarize our views with respect to a Canadian industry move to shorten the standard settlement cycle for most trades in securities from three days after the date of trade (T+3) to two days after the date of trade (T+2).

In October 2014, most of the markets in Europe moved from a T+3 settlement cycle to T+2.{1} The securities industry in the United States, led by the U.S. Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) and supported by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), has announced plans to shorten the settlement cycle to T+2 from the current T+3.{2} DTCC and SIFMA have established a broadly-based set of working groups with a mandate to report their findings in April, 2015. The plan is to recommend a T+2 implementation date at that time.

During the Fall of 2014, in anticipation of the U.S. move to a shorter settlement cycle, staff from the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) conducted a sample of industry interviews to gain a sense of the readiness of the Canadian industry to make the move to T+2. All the industry participants interviewed expressed the view that the Canadian industry must make the move to T+2 at the same time as the U.S. markets. Failure to do so would be detrimental to the Canadian capital markets due to the interconnectedness of our markets (i.e., the large volumes and value of cross-border trades and the large number of inter-listed securities). At the same time, there would appear to be little, or no, benefit to be gained by moving prior to the U.S.

And today, SEC Commissioner Michael S. Piwowar issued a statement of his own:

Just over a year ago, Commissioner Stein and I issued a joint statement in support of a proposal to shorten the trade settlement cycle from three business days after a trade is executed (T+3) to two business days (T+2).[1] Our voices added to the chorus of endorsements for such a rulemaking,[2] which have since reached a crescendo.[3] The drumbeat for Commission action on this important topic is premised on the general expectation that shortening the settlement cycle will, among other benefits, enhance the efficiency of the securities markets, decrease risks in the financial system to retail investors and other market participants, and conform trade processing in the United States to other global markets.

Despite the widespread support for a proposal that would shorten the settlement cycle to T+2, the Commission has yet to act. Quite notably, our failure to promulgate such a proposal is in contravention of the agency rule list published in the most recent Regulatory Flexibility Agenda, which specified a June 2016 action date for this project.[4] Also, we have left market participants wondering whether the Commission is truly committed to shortening the settlement cycle.

The delay in issuing a T+2 proposal is wholly unacceptable. That the rulemaking has languished is not only frustrating to me personally, but is detrimental to efforts to improve investor protection. I continue to vigorously advocate for the Commission to act promptly on this rulemaking, and I encourage others to do the same.

And – totally off topic, but I can’t resist – an Ontario cabinet minister is spouting the Chinese government line:

Mr. Kenney’s recent comments arose after Mr. Chan defended China’s record on human rights in a Chinese-language column.

“Human rights should be viewed from the perspective of livelihood issues,” he told an unidentified journalist for a June 6 article that appeared in several Chinese-language publications. “The progress of human rights is complementary and linked together with the progress of people’s welfare.”

The comments were made in response to a diplomatic incident last month involving a news conference held by Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion and Wang Yi, his Chinese counterpart.

The Great British Property Fund Debacle keeps getting worse:

The uncertainty sweeping across Britain’s commercial property market in the wake of Brexit has affected more funds, including a few owned by Canadian firms.

Bank of Montreal’s Global Asset Management adjusted its U.K. property fund because of an increased number of redemption requests after the June 24 referendum vote in Britain to leave the European Union.

On July 7, BMO’s asset management division announced that its F&C UK Property Fund had cut the price of its units 5 per cent. It said the change was a result of a move to “fair value pricing” that accounted for the uncertainty and downward pressure surrounding commercial real estate property values in Britain.

“The level of redemption requests we have recently received and market conditions suggest that investors may place further redemptions, leading to downward pressure on realizable property values,” the company stated on its website page for the fund, which invests directly in U.K. commercial real estate.

BMO GAM said it has also increased the frequency of valuations for the buildings owned in the fund from a monthly to a weekly basis as a result of the “significant market volatility” following the Brexit vote, requiring closer monitoring as a result.

Last month, BMO GAM’s fact sheet on F&C UK Property said the fund had a value of £305-million ($512.2-million) and a unit price of £110.80. On Thursday, the unit price had fallen to £98.43, a drop of £12.37 or 11.16 per cent.