The Daily Business Charade: Why None of It Matters

You ever try to watch ten different TV shows at once?

That’s what reading the news feels like these days. On one screen, you’ve got a high-stakes political drama where the U.S. President cancels trade talks over a political ad—an ad!—and the Treasury Secretary casually mentions that, yeah, maybe they’ll slap more tariffs on their biggest trading partner. On another, you’ve got a sci-fi thriller where a shadowy partnership of Westinghouse, Cameco, and Brookfield are cooking up an $80-billion plan to build a fleet of nuclear plants.

Then, flip the channel, and you’re watching a sad reality show. Your power bill in Ontario is going up. Imperial Oil, fresh off a banner profit report, is "relocating and outsourcing" jobs, which is just the most bloodless, corporate-HR way of saying they’re firing a bunch of Canadians.

It’s a firehose of disconnected chaos, and they expect us to make sense of it. They want us to nod along, to feel informed. I don’t feel informed. I feel like I’m being deliberately distracted while someone picks my pocket.

The Magician's Assistant

Let’s be real. The government stuff is just the magician’s assistant—the flashy, noisy part of the show designed to draw your eye. Look over here! Ottawa is finally drafting rules for stablecoins. It's about time. No, wait, 'about time' implies they know what they're doing—this is more like your grandpa trying to set up a TikTok account five years after the trend has died. They’re drawing up rules for a digital wild west while the actual federal government is running an $11 billion deficit in just five months. It’s a joke.

Then you have the G7, the Avengers of international bureaucracy, assembling to make grand pronouncements. They’re committing to ensure Ukraine’s energy security and pledging funds for "critical minerals" projects in Quebec and Ontario. It all sounds so noble, so important. I can almost picture them in a sterile conference room, the air thick with the smell of catered coffee and self-importance, nodding gravely as they sign a piece of paper that will be forgotten by next week.

Are we supposed to believe this is the main event? That these pacts and draft legislations are what’s really shaping our future? Because while they’re busy with their photo-ops, the real trick is happening somewhere else entirely.

Follow the Real Money

Forget the politicians. If you want to know what’s actually going on, watch where the quiet money is going.

Warren Buffett, the folksy grandpa of American capitalism, isn’t buying into the hype. He’s quietly divesting from Verizon and piling into old-school energy giants like Chevron and Occidental Petroleum to the tune of $33 billion. At the same time, his cash hoard—the money he’s keeping on the sidelines—has hit a new record. What does that tell you? It tells you the guy who’s better at this game than anyone else is betting on hard assets and holding a mountain of cash, just in case the whole flimsy house of cards comes tumbling down. He’s not buying NFTs or stablecoins, is he?

This is the real economy, the one that operates on a different plane. It’s Onex and AIG dropping a cool US$7 billion on an insurer. It’s Bombardier, a company that’s been on life support more times than I can count, suddenly in talks to build Swedish fighter jets in Canada. These aren't small, speculative bets. This is tectonic plate-shifting stuff.

And while that’s happening, the public markets, where the rest of us are forced to play, are acting like a paranoid squirrel on meth. Allied Properties REIT, a company that owns actual physical buildings, sees its stock fall 17% because management merely floated the possibility of a distribution cut. MDA’s shares get hammered because of fears they could lose a contract. The entire system is so juiced on cheap money and speculation that a single bad thought can vaporize millions of dollars in value. It ain't built on fundamentals; its built on vibes. Then again, maybe I'm the crazy one for thinking a company's value should be tied to, you know, the value it creates.

The Squeeze at the Bottom

So where does that leave you and me? We’re stuck in the middle, trying to navigate the fallout from all this high-level maneuvering.

We’re the ones on the wait-list for Wealthsimple’s shiny new credit card, a product from a $10 billion company that somehow can’t seem to get plastic into the hands of people who want it. We’re the ones being told that the Canadian housing market bubble has "already burst," a comforting piece of analysis that probably feels like a slap in the face if you just signed up for one of those newly-popular variable-rate mortgages. The experts always declare the crisis is over long after the damage is done.

Look at the little clues. People are cashing in their rewards points. The dream of saving up for a free flight or a new blender is dead. Now, everyone just wants cash back. We’re all in this micro-hustle, trying to claw back 1.5% from a system that’s taking 2.4% from us in inflation and jacking up our power bills to boot.

I saw that Alex Tilley, the guy who designed the iconic Tilley hat, passed away. He was 87. The guy made one thing, a simple, durable, reliable hat, and he made it well. There was something honest about it. You bought the hat, it kept the sun off your head. The transaction was clear. Now, everything is an abstraction. A derivative of a derivative. A promise of a future profit that might vanish because of a tweet or an unexpected tax expense in Brazil. Offcourse, we're told it's progress. But is it?

It's All a Shell Game

Let's stop pretending. All this news, all these data points, they aren't a coherent picture. They're confetti, thrown in the air to confuse us. The real story is simple: the people with real power and real money are quietly arranging the board for the next decade, betting on energy, hard assets, and cash. Everyone else is being sold a story about innovation, regulation, and international cooperation while getting squeezed from every possible angle. The game is the game. And we’re not playing; we’re the pieces.