Welcome to The Globe and Mail’s business and investing news quiz. Join us each week to test your knowledge of the stories making headlines. Our business reporters come up with the questions, and you can show us what you know.
This week: U.S. companies aren’t getting much support from President Donald Trump as their businesses continue to be hit with tariffs, and one big Canadian retailer was acquired this week. Which one? Take our quiz and find out.
a. Mountain Equipment Company. Mr. Gu brings considerable expertise to his new acquisition. He already owns apparel factories in Canada and abroad and is an investor in Canadian apparel brands Roots and Tilley. He hopes to reinvigorate MEC, the iconic outdoors retailer that filed for creditor protection during the pandemic. It was subsequently acquired by California-based Kingswood Capital Management, but fell behind on payments to vendors and was again put up for sale earlier this year.
b. Design their online stores using a handful of descriptive words. The AI Store Builder asks customers open-ended questions about how they would like their store to be set-up. It then generates three store layouts, complete with images and text, based on keywords in their answers.
d. Eat them. When Walmart executives warned investors that the giant retailer is going to have to raise prices to offset the cost of tariffs, they received a stinging rebuke from Mr. Trump, who fired off a social media tirade in which he told Walmart to “EAT THE TARIFFS.” Gee, thanks, Mr. President.
c. Meeting net-zero targets for carbon emissions. CPPIB said that “recent legal developments” in Canada have changed how net-zero commitments are interpreted and forced the giant pension fund to drop the net-zero goal it adopted in 2022.
d. About half. Hey, what happened to “elbows up” and all that? CPPIB said this week that 47 per cent of its assets were invested in the United States at the end of March. This is up from 42 per cent in 2024.
b. Spain, like many other countries, is grappling with a housing affordability crisis. To help alleviate the crunch, Madrid is cracking down on short-term rental companies.
b. Older planes. Canada has more old jets deployed for passenger service than any other country. The aged planes can pose maintenance challenges, but operators say they are ideally suited for commercial flights to remote destinations.
a. Novo Nordisk. The market for weight-loss drugs is booming, but that doesn’t mean everything is rosy for the companies that produce them. Consider Novo Nordisk, which makes anti-obesity aid Wegovy. Its share price has been cut in half over the past year and this week it forced out chief executive Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen. The problem? Wegovy is losing ground to Eli Lilly’s rival drug, Zepbound.
c. US$110,000. Bitcoin hit a record high of US$111,000 on Thursday morning. It has gained about 18 per cent this year, bolstered by the Trump administration’s pro-crypto agenda.
d. It makes batteries. China’s CATL is the world’s largest maker of batteries for electric vehicles. Its shares jumped more than 16 per cent after the company made its trading debut in Hong Kong.
a. Donating to political causes. Mr. Musk, who spent nearly US$300-million to support Donald Trump and other Republicans last year, said he plans to significantly cut back on his political spending.
c. One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The bill gets its name from Donald Trump’s catchphrase for describing what he wanted Congress to pass.