Major banking institution, Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD), initiated lay-offs in Canada and the United States as part of a company wide initiative to cut costs. TD, who is Canada’s biggest lender by assets, brought in Boston Consulting Group to examine efficiency, before the job cuts were proposed. The cuts, which have been rolling out over the last week, and are expected to move into next week, truly are company-wide, as they include staff from retail, wholesale, investment banking, and other support staff.
Texas oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens’ lawsuit against the Liberal Government of Ontario under NAFTA is finally close to the finish line. For the past four years, Pickens has been fighting the government after claims of “unfair” backroom deals involving the province’s green energy program caused Pickens’ renewable energy company Mesa Power to lose out on wind power contracts to Florida-based NextEra Energy. The tycoon claims that the favour fell to NextEra after an $18,600 donation to the Liberal party before the 2011 provincial elections. However, after years of disputing and determining that Mesa Power submitted their applications incorrectly, the case is drawing to a close.
In the wake of the Volkswagen scandal, other car retailers have been looking better and better. At least, that was the case for Kia, until the manufacturer’s order to recall more than 42,000 Sorento SUVs in Canada. In total, Kia is expected to recall over 419,000 SUVs from the United States and Canada, due to a defective break-shift in models from 2011 to 2013. The investigation into the cause of the faulty brake-shift came after the company was given notification of a child suffering a broken leg when a vehicle rolled out of a parked position. After discovering that there were 54 warranty claims, the manufacturer decided to issue a recall of the vehicle.
New co-chief executive of Deutsche Bank, John Cryan, has taken the next step in the company’s restructuring, following the scandals the lender faced in the past. The latest step in the plan will be to split the securities and asset-gathering businesses in two. Additionally, four senior managers are set to leave. With the coming changes, five of the six executives that were singled out by the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, also known as BaFin, for incompetence or over the Libor-fixing scandal will have either parted ways with the bank or have been demoted. In addition to this, Cryan hopes that these changes will lend to future accountability increases, which should strengthen relationships with clients and investors.
With presidential and federal elections taking place, health care and medicinal drugs have been a more frequent topic of discussion. Specifically, many are talking about the high costs of innovations, which provide minimal marginal benefit, but cause prices to spike. The need for medication seems to be ever increasing in today’s society, and some believe that they have found a way in which they can keep prices low, while still encouraging drug companies to innovate: reference pricing. The practice is popular in European countries, where drug prices are but a fraction of those in the United States and Canada. By creating classes that group similar drugs together and setting a price level for the class for insurers, it helps to keep the prices low. Of course, other drugs can be made available, but that is at the discretion of the individual. If installed, reference pricing could see to a large drop in medicinal drug costs and more affordable health care.