Free Lunch by The Peak

It's no secret that Canada's office market isn't doing so hot. Vacancies are still way above pre-pandemic levels, and some big companies like Shopify are giving up their leases altogether. In the US, where similar dynamics are in play, the value of some commercial buildings have been marked down by as much as 80% in fire sales by panicked landlords. Should we be worried about our own office real e...

Few sectors of the economy were as impacted by the pandemic as travel, and few rebounded as quickly when public health restrictions were lifted. Even now, demand for travel is through the roof, and it's driving up prices for everything from hotels to airfare to car rentals. At the same time, leisure budgets are often the first to be cut as cost-of-living pressures take their toll, and people cut b...

Stop me if you've heard this before: Canada has a productivity problem. You can't open up the business news without reading dire warnings about what's going to happen to the country if we don't improve our productivity. But what is productivity, anyway? What does it mean for an economy to be more or less productive? How does it affect regular people? Should we even care about this metric? And if s...

We all know that prices are going up (and have been for some time, now). But how do retailers actually decide when and by how much to raise prices? Is it just a simple matter of charging whatever people will pay? Or is it determined by their own costs? And have businesses been using pandemic-era supply chain problems as an excuse to raise prices now, or have they been forced to do so by factors be...

President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act may be good news for the clean energy sector, but what does it mean for Canada? That's a more complex question. On one hand, some aspects of it are likely to benefit Canadian businesses. But much of the funding included in the legislation is reserved for American producers and could make it difficult for Canada to build its own domestic clean energy sector...

Various levels of government in Canada have allocated many billions (with a b) to projects aimed at building more affordable housing, and yet it doesn't seem like much is actually getting built—certainly not on the scale that we experienced in earlier decades. Why is that, and what needs to be done to change it? On this episode, we're joined by Jacob Gorenkoff and Marika Albert, two policy experts...

In the past six months, publicly-available artificial intelligence models have advanced from an interesting toy to, with the launch of ChatGPT-4, something altogether different. The new version of OpenAI's language model can write reasonably good code, pass standardized tests like the LSAT with flying colours, and understand subtle jokes—things that machines have never done. As its capabilities ha...

Bank runs have been back in the news of late, but not in Canada. Here, our banking system appears to be doing just fine—as it has through every economic crisis in recent memory. Why is that? Financial historian John Turley-Ewart joins us to tell the story of how Canada's banking system came to be, why it has proven to be less vulnerable to bank runs than the US model, and whether Canadians have an...

What went wrong at Silicon Valley Bank? In the course of a few days, the bank of choice for the US tech sector collapsed, forcing regulators to take unprecedented steps to avoid a broader financial crisis. On this bonus episode of Free Lunch by The Peak, Murad Hemmadi, a correspondent for The Logic covering business and innovation policy, joins us to unpack how SVB went under so quickly and what t...

Russia's invasion of Ukraine threw the world's energy market into chaos and added a renewed sense of urgency to the search for new sources of power. Many Western governments, including Canada's, are betting big on wind and solar, but there's also growing interest in nuclear power as a reliable and clean alternative. At the same time, many people still have questions about how safe it really is (an...

Sports is a big business, but it's changing dramatically in the era of streaming and the decline of the cable bundle. Old leagues are trying to adapt (see: Major League Baseball's controversial pitch clock), while new franchises pop seemingly out of nowhere (see: Formula One). Meanwhile, the sports media landscape is becoming more fragmented, with new players like Netflix and Apple competing aggre...

Inflation has (arguably) been the biggest economic story of the past year in Canada, so it's worth taking the time to really understand it. How is it calculated? What's contributing to it right now? And how do different sectors of the economy affect how prices in other sectors fluctuate? Turns out it's pretty complicated. Fortunately, Trevor Tombe, Professor of Economics at the University of Calga...

Markets are enjoying a surprisingly strong start to the year after a rough last-half of 2022. Inflation has fallen from its peaks, and more people are talking about a soft-landing—or even a "no-landing" scenario—for the economy. But there's good reason to think we aren't out of the woods yet. On this episode of Free Lunch by The Peak, BlackRock's Senior Strategist for North America ,Kurt Reiman, j...

Canada's housing market is in a strange place right now. Prices are dropping, but affordability is the worst it's ever been. There's enormous unmet demand for homes, but the pace of new construction is falling and developers are going under. Buyers and sellers are in a holding pattern, waiting to see what central banks do next. Where do we go from here? On this episode, Daniel Foch joins us to bre...

In 2016 a long-time employee at the Publix grocery store chain in Atlanta cashed in over $1 million of the company's stock and retired early. That's because Publix employees are part of something called an employee ownership trust, which allows them to accumulate a stake in the business over time. Employee ownership trusts already exist in the US and UK, and their advocates say they improve job sa...

After soaring during the pandemic, tech companies big and small have spent the past year cutting costs and laying off thousands of workers. At the same time, unemployment is at a record low, job vacancies are high, and many non-tech businesses are complaining about a labour shortage. So what can we really learn about the broader economy from the tech winter we're experiencing now, and what impact...

Buying local food and produce is a big deal for a lot of Canadians—but so is the rising cost of groceries, and local options are often (though, as we'll find out in this episode, not always) more expensive. Why is that? In this episode, we dig into the supply chain of an Ontario baking business that relies on local suppliers and farmers for its products, and look at how the cost of doing business...

Anyone who has dealt with Canada's healthcare system knows that it's under incredible strain. Part of that is because of the pandemic and the backlogs that piled up over the past three years. But many of the factors that led to the crisis we're now facing have been building up for much longer than that. Dr. Saad Ahmed, a family physician based out of Vancouver and lecturer at the University of Tor...

Electric vehicles are going mainstream. Governments around the world are setting aggressive targets for EV adoption (Canada is aiming for 100% of light vehicles sold to be electric by 2035), and automakers are investing heavily in ramping up EV production to meet surging demand. But who is going to make all the vehicles and the all-important batteries that go into them? Erik Reed argues that Canad...

Between ChatGPT generating limericks in the style of George Costanza and Lensa turning your profile picture into a cartoon, AI seems to have finally broken into mainstream awareness in the past few months. But what's going on below the surface? How did the technology advance to this point? Who has been funding its development, and how does it actually work? We dig into all of those issues (and oth...

Canada's housing market has become our national obsession, and with good reason. Years of skyrocketing prices are now meeting surging mortgage rates, and the result is some of the least affordable housing in the world. What's driving that affordability crisis, and what comes next? On this episode of Free Lunch by The Peak, we speak with Mike Moffatt, a Senior Director at the Smart Prosperity Insti...

In this special holiday episode, we're joined by Brett Chang from The Peak Daily to look back at 2022, chat through some of the biggest stories of the year, and make some predictions about what's to come in 2023. Plus: Our reading recommendations from the year. We're back to our regularly scheduled programming next week. See you in the new year!

The system of low-cost, hyper-efficient manufacturing that emerged after the end of the Cold War promised to deliver the goods—literally—and usher in a new era of high growth and cheap consumer products. But after years of supply chain disruptions brought on by the pandemic and growing detachment between China and the West, we're now seeing how fragile that system really can be. Is it time for som...

Canada's labour market has been through a wild ride over the past 3 years or so, from pandemic-era lockdowns to an incredible re-opening bounceback and record low unemployment. And now, with the Bank of Canada trying to cool off the economy and a recession (maybe?) on the horizon, things are getting... strange. On this episode of the podcast, we talk with Brendon Bernard, a Senior Economist at the...

Welcome to Free Lunch by The Peak, a new weekly podcast for Canadians that digs deep into economics, business, finance, and tech. Join us every Tuesday morning for new episodes. Search and follow Free Lunch by The Peak wherever you get your podcasts.