Politics can be confusing, especially when it's hard to tell how one guy differs from another. I've written before how we don't really know what Michael Ignatieff stands for and that Stephen Harper has shifted from tax-cutting Conservative to big spending prime minister, but in the most recent Canadian Business ...

The 2009 edition of the Canadian Business Investor 500 is now out, and what a difference a year makes. The list covers Canada's largest 500 public companies by market capitalization so includes about 97% of the Canadian domiciled market cap on public exchanges. For the 12 months ended April 3, ...

...even though the numbers are crummy. The GDP figures released by Statistics Canada last week were widely presented as a good news/bad news proposition in the media. On the one hand, the numbers stunk — the economy grew at an annualized rate of just 0.3% in the second quarter. But, on ...

A recent article (registration required) in the McKinsey Quarterly by Thomas Luedi, a principal in McKinsey's Shanghai office, points out the tremendous growth in foreign acquisitions made by Chinese firms. According to the report, foreign direct investments made by Chinese companies increased tenfold from 2003 to 2007. Although, measured as ...

The likelihood of a U.S. recession occurring in 2008 has significantly receded in recent months, according to trading in Intrade.com's prediction market. It has dropped to 32%, way down from 75% in March. A recession is defined by Intrade.com as two successive quarters of negative real growth in GDP.