Reporting by David Ljunggren; Editing by David Gregorio
Finance
Canada’s housing crisis will take years to solve, finance minister says
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A house under construction in a neighbourhood of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada April 17, 2023. REUTERS/Lars Hagberg//File Photo Acquire Licensing Rights
Sept 16 (Reuters) – An affordable housing crisis that is hurting the Canadian government’s popularity will take years to resolve, even if construction hits an 80-year high, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said on Saturday.
Her comments were among the first by a senior member of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal administration to acknowledge the scale of the challenge. Polls show the Liberals trailing their Conservative rivals, who blame Ottawa for high inflation and soaring home prices.
Housing is mainly the responsibility of the 10 provinces as well as major municipalities, with Ottawa’s role limited to policy advice and financial incentives.
“It will take all of us — the federal government and the provinces, cities and towns, the private sector and non-profits … working together in common cause, not for weeks or months, but for years,” Freeland said.
“Building the homes a growing Canada needs will require another great national effort,” she told a Montreal conference, saying the country would have to build homes at a speed and scale not seen since the 1940s and 1950s.
In a bid to boost supply, the government has said it will remove the federal 5% consumption tax on the construction of new rental apartment buildings and is telling cities to do more to address the issue.
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Finance
Asian shares slide and US futures and dollar drop after Wall Street’s winning week
HONG KONG (AP) — Asian shares fell Monday and U.S. futures and the dollar weakened after Moody’sRatings downgraded the sovereign credit rating for the United States because of its failure to stem a rising tide of debt.
The future for the S&P 500 lost 0.9% while that for the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.6%. The U.S. dollar slipped to 145.14 Japanese yen from 145.65 yen. The euro was unchanged at $1.1183.
Chinese markets fell after the government said retail sales rose 5.1% in April from a year earlier, less than expected. Growth in industrial output slowed to 6.1% year-on-year from 7.7% in March.
That could mean rising inventories if production outpaces demand even more than it already does. But it also may reflect some of the shipping boom before some of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods took effect.
“After an improvement in March, China’s economy looks to have slowed again last month, with firms and households turning more cautious due to the trade war,” Julian Evans-Pritchard of Capital Economics said in a report.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng lost 0.7% to 23,184.74 and the Shanghai Composite Index edged 0.2% lower to 3,361.72.
Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 gave up 0.4% to 37,605.85 while the Kospi in Seoul dropped 1% to 2,600.57.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 declined 0.1% to 8,333.80.
Taiwan’s Taiex was 0.8% lower.
Wall Street cruised to a strong finish last week as U.S. stocks glided closer to the all-time high they set just a few months earlier, though it may feel like an economic era ago.
The S&P 500 rose 0.7% to 5,958.38 for a fifth straight gain. It has rallied to within 3% of its record set in February after it briefly dropped roughly 20% below it last month.
Gains have been driven by hopes that Trump will lower his tariffs against other countries after reaching trade deals with them.
The Dow industrials added 0.8% to 42,654.74, and the Nasdaq composite climbed 0.5% to 19,211.10.
Trump’s trade war sent financial markets reeling because they could slow the economy and drive it into a recession, while also pushing inflation higher.
This week featured some encouraging news on each of those fronts. The United States and China announced a 90-day stand-down in most of their punishing tariffs against each other, while a couple of reports on inflation in the United States came in better than economists expected.
That uncertainty has been hitting U.S. households and businesses, raising worries that they may freeze their spending and long-term plans. The latest reading in a survey of U.S. consumers by the University of Michigan showed sentiment soured again in May, though the pace of decline wasn’t as bad as in prior months.
Finance
How to block the financial scammers on social media

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Online scams are big business. In the EU, according to the most recent figures, online scammers defrauded consumers out of €4.3bn in 2022. Increasingly, they use sophisticated adverts, including AI-generated “deepfakes” of figures ranging from Elon Musk to the UK personal finance expert Martin Lewis, to lure individuals into disclosing personal data or investing in fraudulent schemes. The vehicle is often social media platforms, which profit indirectly from carrying the ads. No business, least of all some of the world’s most powerful, should be able to profit from fraud on this scale.
Though mechanisms are improving for reimbursing victims, generally by the banking sector, the harm done by such frauds is huge. It includes not just the immediate losses and stress to victims and their banks, but also the erosion of trust in respectable sources of information and the financial industry.
Getting fraudulent material taken down, however, can be a game of “whack a mole” — as the Financial Times discovered when deepfake ads were found on Meta platforms apparently showing its columnist Martin Wolf promoting fraudulent investments. The FT has established that these fakes were seen by millions of users; many may have lost money as a result. As soon as one ad was removed, others popped up from different accounts, with Meta’s systems seemingly unable to keep up, though they do now seem to have been stopped.
Circulation of fraudulent, indeed criminal, material cannot be justified. Given how hard it is to stamp out advertising after the fact, though, this is a case where prevention is better than cure. Social media should have a legal duty not to provide ad space to fraudsters in the first place. They ought to be expected to “know their customers” and be held liable, with proper enforcement and tough penalties, if they fail to block dissemination of fraudulent ads.
The EU is considering legislation on those lines. Member states are discussing proposals from Brussels to introduce a right to automatic reimbursement from PayPal, Visa, Mastercard and banks for customers defrauded by scammers. But an amendment submitted by the Irish finance ministry, and gaining traction in other EU capitals, would go further — by legally requiring online platforms to check that an advertiser is authorised by a regulator to sell financial services, and block it if not.
Brussels frets that the amendment would conflict with a provision in the EU’s Digital Services Act that online platforms are not required to conduct broad-based monitoring of content. There may be squeamishness over antagonising Donald Trump, who wants to defang EU regulation of US tech firms.
Yet having to verify whether financial advertisers are authorised does not constitute large-scale monitoring, and would only be required of very large online platforms or search engines. Some already do it, or have committed to: Google has a financial services certification programme in 17 countries, while Meta agreed with the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority in 2022 to ban financial ads by firms not registered with the regulator. And the EU should prioritise robust consumer protection over the protestations of the US president and his Big tech backers.
A legal obligation to verify financial advertisers would not address the wider problem of celebrity deepfakes being used in scams and promotions linked to products ranging from cookware sets to dental products. But the fact that sellers of financial products must usually be registered with regulators opens a route to blocking a particularly harmful online fraud. The EU, and the UK, should set an example to other jurisdictions and take action now.
Finance
Walmart should ‘eat the tariffs,’ Trump says, after retailer warns of looming price hikes
Walmart (WMT) joins rocker Bruce Springsteen and pop music icon Taylor Swift as getting a verbal lashing from president Trump on social media this week.
The president ripped Walmart execs on Saturday for signaling tariff-driven price hikes that are poised to begin later this month.
“Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain. Walmart made BILLIONS OF DOLLARS last year, far more than expected. Between Walmart and China they should, as is said, ‘EAT THE TARIFFS,’ and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.
“We have always worked to keep our prices as low as possible and we won’t stop. We’ll keep prices as low as we can for as long as we can given the reality of small retail margins,” a Walmart spokesperson told Yahoo Finance.
Walmart CEO Doug McMillon was among the CEOs who met with the president in late April to discuss tariff implications. A person familiar with the discussions told Yahoo Finance Walmart made a case to remove tariffs on China altogether as even lower tariffs would have major implications on prices for general merchandise items such as furniture and toys.
The Trump administration and China agreed to dial back tariffs for 90 days last week. The US tariff rate on China now sits at 30%, down from 145% at the height of the trade tussle between the economic superpowers.
“Low prices is what we stand for, and we’re going to keep prices as low as we can as long as we can,” Walmart CFO John David Rainey said on Yahoo Finance’s Catalysts (video above) this week following the company’s first quarter earnings. “But when you look at the magnitude of some of the cost increases on certain categories of items that are imported, it’s more than what retailers can bear. It’s more than what suppliers can bear.”
“And so we’ll work hard to try to keep prices low. But it’s unavoidable that you’re going to see some prices go up on certain items.”
Rainey said increases will be noticeable later this month.
Rainey added, “Well, if you’ve got a 30% tariff on something, you’re likely going to see double digits [in price increases].”
The most impacted areas for Walmart will include baby strollers, furniture, and toys. Price hikes in these departments could major impacts on suppliers such as Newell Brands (NWL), reports Yahoo Finance’s Brooke DiPalma.
Walmart’s earnings day was mixed as shoppers spent somewhat cautiously given the greater economic uncertainty.
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