Business
In Canada’s ‘Suburb of Detroit,’ Fears Over Trump’s Tariff Threat
Since 1988, the hulking presses at Lanex Manufacturing on the edge of Windsor, Ontario, have been stamping out door strikers, folding-seat latches, tailpipe hangers, frame braces and other prosaic bits of metal that make their way into vehicles ranging from Corvettes to Honda minivans.
But, these days, worries about the future permeate the plant as President-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to enter the White House. He has threatened to impose a 25 percent tariff on all goods exported from Canada to the United States. In Windsor, that would ravage its lifeblood: automobiles and everything that goes into them.
“Everybody’s waiting for the next shoe to drop,” Bruce Lane, the president of Lanex, said in its boardroom, whose walls were made of painted concrete blocks. “If Windsor lost its automotive business, Windsor would not survive.”
Few Canadian cities are as acutely aware as Windsor of the integration of the two countries’ economies. The city sits just across the Detroit River from Detroit, and Canada’s maple-leaf flag often flies next to the stars and stripes there. And no industry has been interwoven across the border for as long as auto making.
“These workers here in Windsor are more exposed to trade with the United States than anyone else,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said at a steel plant during a recent visit to the city.
Mr. Trump, he added, “is proposing tariffs that would damage not just people here in Windsor but people right across the country and indeed in the United States.”
Windsor’s two major landmarks are shared with Detroit: the $5.7 billion Gordie Howe International Bridge, scheduled to open this year, and the 96-year-old Ambassador Bridge, which carries about $300 million in cross-border trade each day. Of Canada’s $440 billion in annual exports to the United States, only oil and gas generate a larger amount than cars, trucks and auto parts.
But with Canadian officials taking Mr. Trump at his word that he will follow through on his threat of tariffs, Mr. Lane and others in the auto industry are already bracing for the potential fallout.
George Papp is the chief executive of Papp Plastics, whose headquarters sits near the imposing new suspension bridge. He said his U.S. customers, mainly automakers, would simply invoke the terms of contracts he has with them and deduct the cost of tariffs from the amount they pay him.
“Who’s going to take the hit?” Mr. Papp said. “Me, and people like me and companies like mine.”
Flavio Volpe, the president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturer’s Association, a Canadian trade group, estimated that most of his members had single-digit profit margins and that the tariffs Mr. Trump was threatening would be ruinous.
The intertwining of the auto industry across the two countries was cemented in 1965 when Canada and the United States reached an agreement that effectively eliminated the border for the industry. Today, 90 percent of cars and trucks made in Canada are sent to the United States, primarily by train.
At Lanex, small metal parts that few motorists will ever see are forged into shape by upward of 600 tons of pressure by the firm’s presses. Their journeys illustrate how enmeshed the two countries’ auto industries have become.
As a small supplier, Mr. Lane does not deal directly with carmakers, but sells his goods through larger parts makers. Seat-locking hooks that Lanex makes for Honda minivans are sent to a plant elsewhere in Ontario, where they are fitted with other parts and then shipped to an assembly line in Alabama that belongs to Honda, a Japanese company.
Mr. Lane’s factory has sent parts to Michigan for heat treating, brought them back to Windsor for more machining and then sold them to a U.S. company.
“Windsor is used to going back and forth across the border,” Mr. Lane said. “It’s like just like getting up out of bed in the morning.”
The turmoil from possible tariffs comes at an already difficult time for Canada’s auto business. Many auto-parts manufacturers have yet to see their business return to levels from before the coronavirus pandemic because of lagging car sales. In 2020, Lanex had about 60 employees working on two shifts, but it now has about two dozen employees running a single shift.
The anxiety is particularly acute in Windsor, which has a metropolitan population of roughly 484,000. Aside from cargo trucks rumbling across the Ambassador Bridge, the city’s most obvious automotive symbol is a giant Stellantis factory that produces Chrysler Pacifica minivans as well as Dodge Charger muscle cars.
A city within the city, the European-based Stellantis employs 4,500 workers at the factory. Aided by billions of dollars in Canadian subsidies, it is building a battery plant in a joint venture with the South Korean company LG in Windsor and recently spent 1.89 billion Canadian dollars (about $1.3 billion) to retool its assembly plant to make electric vehicles alongside gasoline-powered ones.
But, like many auto makers, Stellantis is now in a slump as it struggles with the transition to electric vehicles and with competition from China.
James Stewart, the president of the local union that represents Windsor’s Stellantis workers, said he did not believe a large tariff would necessarily deal a fatal blow to Stellantis’s operations in Windsor, given how much the company had invested.
But with so much of Windsor’s economic well-being intimately tied to trade with the United States, Mr. Stewart said, tariffs would deal a heavy blow, including the closing of businesses, layoffs and production cuts.
“We’re a suburb of Detroit; we’ve always felt that way,” he said, adding that Windsor seemed to be “under attack and for no reason.”
Mr. Trump initially characterized tariffs as a way to prod Canada and Mexico into better securing their borders to tamp down the flow of undocumented migrants.
But he also mused about making Canada the 51st state, noting that the United States was heavily invested in Canada’s military defense, and threatened to use economic force annex it. He has also vented about what he describes as the “subsidizing’’ of Canada by the United States, an apparent reference to the U.S. trade deficit with Canada, largely because of oil and gas imports.
The Trudeau government is expected to detail how it would retaliate against any U.S. tariffs on Monday, the day Mr. Trump is to take office.
But Canada’s comparatively small economy makes it difficult for the country to inflict substantial economic harm on the United States, though levies against specific products could hurt individual states. Retaliatory tariffs would also drive up prices in Canada.
Back at the Lanex plant, Mr. Lane said that, by pure coincidence, the company had been embarking on a “secret” manufacturing project unrelated to automobiles and that had unexpectedly become a potential hedge against tariffs. He declined to offer any details to avoid tipping off competitors.
Mr. Papp, the plastics-company owner, said that even though he would oppose tariffs, which would hurt his business, he was a fan of Mr. Trump and understood why the president-elect had argued that tariffs were needed to help rebuild industry in the United States.
Regardless of what happens, Mr. Papp said, Canada and the United States will always remain unshakable allies.
“You can’t separate our countries,” he said. “They’re bolted together.”
Waymo, the driverless taxi company that operates in more than 10 cities, will soon serve customers in San Diego.
The company has been testing its autonomous vehicles in San Diego with a safety driver behind the wheel since earlier this year. Rides without a human driver became available to employees Thursday and will open to members of the public later this year.
Waymo, which announced the expansion Wednesday, will also bring its taxis to Tampa, Las Vegas and Denver.
“If you’re in one of these four new cities, download the app to be notified when it’s time to ride,” the company said in a blog post.
Waymo has offered fully autonomous rides in San Francisco since 2022 and in Los Angeles since 2024.
It also serves customers in Nashville, Phoenix, Miami and other cities.
In May, Waymo launched a cheaper robotaxi dubbed the Ojai, which is better equipped for difficult driving conditions such as snowy roads.
The Ojai will supplement Waymo’s fleet of Jaguar I-Paces, the company said. In San Diego, services will be provided with the Ojai.
Waymo also announced Wednesday it’s beginning autonomous driving with a safety driver in its newest retrofitted vehicle, the Hyundai IONIQ 5.
“This phase allows us to validate our technology for fully autonomous operations as we work to bring riders even more ways to enjoy Waymo in the future,” the company said.
The company plans to eventually have tens of thousands of driverless taxis made per year, starting with the Ojai, then scaling using the IONIQ 5s.
The move into San Diego and three other cities widens the gap between Waymo and its competitors in the robotaxi race.
Elon Musk’s Tesla robotaxis and Amazon-owned Zoox are shuttling customers autonomously, but are nowhere near the scale at which Waymo operates.
Other companies are working on autonomous trucks and freight trains.
Waymo’s San Diego service area will include Pacific Beach, Normal Heights, La Playa and Southcrest, among other neighborhoods, the company said.
StubHub is getting a red card from some World Cup fans
Two World Cup customers are suing the New York-based ticket-selling company, alleging “false and misleading” advertising that left them without tickets or a refund for the World Cup games they paid to attend.
In federal court in New York last week, two Californians — Julia Reeker Moghal and Reuben Renteria — sued StubHub seeking monetary damages and a ban on the company selling World Cup tickets. The lawsuit aims to become a class action and comes after weeks of fierce criticism and complaints from customers regarding the company’s practices.
Throughout the World Cup, videos have emerged on Instagram and TikTok of StubHub customers describing their nightmare experiences with the ticket-selling platform.
Some said they had purchased tickets to World Cup games as early as November of last year, booked flights and hotels and arranged travel plans, then StubHub notified them days to weeks before the match of a refund for their tickets, which they never requested.
There were similar complaints about last-minute cancellations from people who bought Coachella tickets on StubHub.
In the lawsuit, Moghal said she had purchased three tickets for nearly $2,000 for the June 18 match between Switzerland and Bosnia-Herzegovina at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, which were then canceled by StubHub. Moghal said she was contacted by StubHub and told her tickets would remain canceled, then was later told the tickets would be available one hour before the game.
When the match began, Moghal said she was at SoFi Stadium, but the tickets never came.
Renteria said he paid around $2,300 for the June 18 Mexico versus South Korea match in Guadalajara, Mexico, but they were canceled
“Devoted soccer fans have traveled from around the world to attend World Cup matches — and they reasonably relied on StubHub to provide the tickets they paid for as well as on StubHub’s warranty,” Blake Hunter Yagman, the attorney representing the two, said in a statement. “Instead of rewarding their business, StubHub sold them World Cup tickets that they either could not provide or on speculation, only to be stranded, in many cases, at the stadium gates without any recourse.”
According to StubHub’s website, its Fan Protect Guarantee states the platform will deliver valid tickets or refund in the event of a ticket issue, and that it will “go out of our way to find replacement tickets” of a comparable value. The lawsuit alleges the replacement tickets many fans were given by StubHub were worse than their original tickets.
FIFA, the World Cup organizer, states in its terms and conditions that the FIFA Marketplace, its own ticket-selling platform, is the only authorized platform for World Cup tickets, and that only tickets purchased through it are guaranteed by FIFA to be valid.
Despite the risk of purchasing through a third-party platform such as StubHub, many fans opted to do so to avoid the 30% FIFA resale tax, believing that the Fan Protect Guarantee would safeguard their order.
Since World Cup tickets began selling on FIFA Marketplace last September, fans have expressed disappointment in the expensive price tag. FIFA utilized a dynamic pricing system for the sale, and as sales phases progressed leading up to the games, the cost of tickets increased tremendously. In March, the extreme cost of tickets prompted 69 members of Congress to write a letter to FIFA urging them to lower their prices.
Tickets for the upcoming Friday match between Spain and Belgium in Los Angeles are selling on StubHub for over $1,300.
StubHub said in various statements to the news and in legal proceedings that ticket cancellations were a result of transfer problems and issues with FIFA’s ticketing infrastructure.
StubHub did not respond to requests for comment.
A FIFA spokesperson responded to this accusation in a statement, saying, “FIFA has no visibility over, or control of, secondary market ticket transactions carried out on third-party platforms. The transactions facilitated on these platforms occur entirely independently of FIFA’s official ticketing platform. With reference to the reliability of the services available to fans on FIFA’s official ticket platform, FIFA rejects any suggestion that the functional issues being experienced by users of third-party platforms with respect to FIFA World Cup 2026 tickets are the result of FIFA’s ticketing infrastructure.”
Business
Commentary: Trump wants to let companies make fewer disclosures, thus keeping investors in the dark
Trump’s SEC is considering eliminating the mandate for quarterly corporate financial reports, but even some big investors call it a lousy idea.
This being the “information age,” it would be understandable if investors sometimes feel inundated with too much information to wade through about the stocks in their mutual fund portfolios.
The Securities and Exchange Commission, bowing like a puppy to the urgings of President Trump, is considering exactly the wrong solution to this supposed burden. It’s proposing to allow public companies to give their investors less information, as though that’s a good thing.
On May 8, the SEC proposed rescinding its mandate that public companies report financial results on a quarterly schedule. Instead, it suggests, semiannual and annual reports should suffice.
This takes an already-unlevel playing field where Main Street investors are already disadvantaged, and makes it more unlevel.
— Dennis Kelleher, Better Markets
The SEC left its proposal open for public comment for 60 days, meaning the window closed Monday. By then, the agency had received more than 68,000 comments, according to a tracker posted online by accounting professor Tzachi Zach of Ohio State.
Almost 99.9% of the comments were negative. Several organizations of institutional investors and auditing professionals, as well as a tsunami of individual investors, expressed opposition.
A similar initiative the SEC aired in 2018, during Trump’s first term, received an overwhelmingly negative response and was eventually dropped.
The tide of opposition coming from individual investors shouldn’t be surprising. “Taking away basic quarterly information means investors are blind for six months at a time,” says Dennis Kelleher, co-founder and chief executive of the investor advocacy nonprofit Better Markets.
That’s especially true for small investors, though perhaps not so much for major institutions, insiders or deep-pocketed individuals. “If you’re a big dog, you’ll get the information anyway,” Kelleher told me. “And insiders, who are trading in their own stock all the time, will have the information. This takes an already-unlevel playing field where Main Street investors are already disadvantaged, and makes it more unlevel.”
Trump set off the latest initiative with a social media post on Sept. 15, advocating the move to a six-month reporting schedule. It read, in part, “This will save money, and allow managers to focus on properly running their companies. Did you ever hear the statement that, ‘China has a 50 to 100 year view on management of a company, whereas we run our companies on a quarterly basis???’ Not good!!!”
As was usual with Trump, his argument was a string of uninformed and irrelevant non sequiturs.
It’s doubtful that eliminating quarterly reports will save much, if any, money. Most 10-Qs are cookie cutter documents disclosing financial figures already embedded in corporate records.
The idea that managers would become empowered to “focus on properly running their companies” if only they were relieved of the burden of preparing a report every three months is just malarkey: Any CEOs who feel the impulse to drop everything and involve themselves in what is essentially an automated process can’t be very good at their jobs.
As for China’s “50 to 100 year view on management of a company,” what would that even mean, even if it were true? China doesn’t operate on a 50 to 100 year corporate horizon, but rather on a string of five-year plans. The most recent of these was adopted by the government in March, covers the period up to 2030, and is its 15th in a row.
Despite the flaws in Trump’s arguments, Trump’s SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, a former corporate lawyer and securities industry consultant, fell into line. Within a few days of Trump’s post, he showed up on CNBC to minimize the potential effect of the change. Private companies rely on semiannual reports, after all, he noted, although the idea of taking private companies as models for publicly traded corporations might not strike experienced investors as the wisest thing.
Atkins cited an enduring chestnut, for which there’s no evidence, that quarterly reporting is responsible for “short-term thinking” in corporate suites (though he admitted that his evidence was “anecdotal”). And he suggested that small investors have ample access to corporate information even without quarterly reports — why, he said, they can just tune in to CNBC!
“To propose change in what our rules are now would be a good way forward,” he said. “So I welcome the president’s putting this up for discussion.”
Something more insidious undergirds the SEC’s proposal than its immediate effect on corporate behavior. The agency rationalizes its proposal as seeking “a tradeoff between reducing regulatory burdens … and promoting efficient financial markets through timely disclosure.”
The problem here, Kelleher points out, is that “reducing regulatory burdens” isn’t part of the SEC’s mission in any way, shape or form. It’s a regulatory agency, and its mission since its founding in 1934 has been to protect investors, not to make things fluffier for stock issuers.
The history of financial disclosure in the U.S. shows a long-term trend favoring more disclosure, not less. In the 1880s, quarterly reporting by railroads and other transportation companies were common.
Early on, pressure for more frequent disclosure came not from government regulators, who barely existed before 1934, but from investors. The reporting of quarterly earnings, notes corporate finance expert Owen Lamont of Acadian Asset Management, was “a bottom-up historical phenomenon reflecting voluntary arrangements between firms and investors, not a top-down phenomenon imposed by law.”
By 1931, according to financial historians, 63% of New York Stock Exchange-listed firms were publishing their quarterly earnings. The Big Board mandated that frequency for most listed companies in 1939. The SEC mandated semiannual reports in 1955 and quarterly reports, as Atkins said, in 1970.
The evidence in favor of dropping the quarterly reports is uniformly thin. Some advocates cite a 2018 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Warren Buffett that was headlined “Short-Termism Is Harming the Economy.”
Couple of points about this: First, the target of Dimon and Buffett wasn’t quarterly financial reporting, but quarterly earnings guidance — that is, the practice of some top executives who project their earnings into the future. (This guidance usually comes at the same time they issue their SEC disclosures.)
It’s guidance, they wrote, that is “a major driver” of short-termism in corporate behavior. That’s because management is giving itself a target it feels obligated to meet, even if factors outside its control interfere with the quest.
Furthermore, Dimon and Buffett wrote, “Our views on quarterly earnings forecasts should not be misconstrued as opposition to quarterly and annual reporting.” They called transparency about financial and operating results “an essential aspect of U.S. public markets … so that the public, including shareholders and other stakeholders, can reliably assess real progress.”
Individual investors may be unmoved by the SEC’s proposal because — let’s be candid — how many of them read quarterly earnings reports, anyway? But that’s unimportant, Kelleher says, because other market participants are reading them. “So that information is in the marketplace, and that’s what actually enables price discovery, so stock prices roughly reflect what’s going on at a company, most of the time.”
More to the point, the quarterly reports reflect the highest-quality, detailed information, the information the SEC requires executives to disclose on pain of facing a civil lawsuit from the agency or even criminal liability for faking data. “Main Street investors, whether they read quarterly reports or not, are the real beneficiaries,” Kelleher says.
That’s so. The bottom line is that quarterly financial reporting helps investors. It doesn’t promote short-term behavior and its costs, modest as they are, don’t outweigh its benefits.
Over the decades, scandal-ridden corporations have hidden fraudulent behavior in the interstices between mandated disclosures—think Enron, WorldCom and Tyco, among others. Why give any corporation, even an honest one, the opportunity to disclose less?
-
North Dakota5 seconds agoThe Women’s College Fan Guide To 2026 Junior Nationals – FloWrestling
-
Ohio7 minutes agoOhio reports nearly 200 cases of ‘explosive diarrhea’ illness
-
Oklahoma10 minutes agoEvery Oklahoma State Cowboys’ College Football 27 Preseason Player Rating
-
Oregon15 minutes agoIllicit massage businesses shut down in Washington County
-
Pennsylvania22 minutes ago
Man arrested over alleged antisemitic threats to Gov. Josh Shapiro | The Jerusalem Post
-
Rhode Island25 minutes agoAquatic Weed Treatments Planned for 2 RI Ponds, 1 Lake
-
South-Carolina30 minutes agoSouth Carolina Lottery Pick 3, Pick 4 results for July 9, 2026
-
South Dakota37 minutes agoIverson Ford Welcomes the 2027 Ford Expedition to Drivers Across Eastern South Dakota
