Friday, November 6, 2026
Unifor will ask more than 9,000 Stellantis workers in Canada to authorise a strike on 17 and 18 October. The union says the company has made the wage and benefit pattern already agreed at Ford and General Motors conditional on the union accepting the closure and sale of the idled Brampton assembly plant to Roshel, an armoured vehicle maker.
The United States imported $420.8 billion of goods and services in August, the most in any month on record, and the trade deficit widened to $105.6 billion, the largest since March 2025. The last record was set by consumer goods rushed in ahead of tariffs. This one is made of capital goods. Four lines of hardware account for more than the whole rise in goods imports this year.
True Food Kitchen, the health-food restaurant chain backed by Oprah Winfrey, filed for Chapter 11 on Sunday and closed 12 of its 46 restaurants. It had about $1.6 million of unrestricted cash, enough for roughly two weeks, and $42.1 million of funded debt, including merchant cash advances. The investor that led its $100 million round in 2022 is now lending it $20 million to stay open while it looks for a buyer.
C.H. Robinson agreed on Sunday to buy RXO, the truck broker spun out of XPO in 2022, for about $5.8 billion including debt. Its own slides value the deal at 13.2 times RXO's expected earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation, but only after $300 million of annual cost savings. Without them the multiple is about 42. C.H. Robinson's shares fell 10.8 per cent on Monday.
The Institute for Supply Management's services survey slipped to 54.9 in September, still comfortably in growth. Its prices index rose to 74, the highest since July 2022. Half of the purchasing managers surveyed paid more for what they buy; 2.2 per cent paid less. All 17 industries that reported a change in prices reported an increase.
Schneider Electric agreed on Sunday to buy PTC, the Boston maker of design and product-lifecycle software, for $205 a share in cash, valuing its equity at about $22.6 billion. That is 42.3 per cent above Friday's close, and 5 per cent below PTC's peak close in August 2025. The French group will borrow most of the money, sell up to €6 billion of new shares and pause its buyback for two years. Its shares fell about 10 per cent in Paris.
The fiscal year closed on Wednesday with a record $332.6 billion of customs deposits, according to the Treasury's daily cash statement. It also closed with $157.8 billion paid out through Customs and Border Protection, against about $10.5 billion in each of the two previous years. Net of those payments, the border raised less than it did in fiscal 2025. Since May, it has paid out $17.5 billion more than it took in.
In the year to September, US employers added 496,000 jobs. Health care and social assistance added 520,000, so the rest of the economy together lost jobs. Measured over 12 months, that has been true every month since June 2025. In payroll data back to 1990, the only comparable stretches came around recessions.
General Motors sold 670,974 vehicles in the US in the third quarter, down 5.5 per cent. Toyota sold 633,223, up 0.6 per cent, and more than half of them were hybrids or other electrified models. Hyundai Motor Group finished 1,195 vehicles behind Ford. The automakers gaining share are the ones with cheap cars and hybrids, in a quarter when gasoline cost $1.35 more than a year earlier.
At least 16 trucking and delivery companies entered bankruptcy between late August and 21 September, FreightWaves found. Seven of them ran six trucks or fewer. Diesel hit a record $6.53 a gallon in the same weeks, but spot freight rates have also risen, from about $2.40 a mile a year ago to $3.42. The squeeze on small carriers is less about the price of fuel than about when they have to pay for it.
Spot rates for a 40-foot container from the Far East to the US West Coast were $8,346 on 1 October, Xeneta said, up 344 per cent since 28 February. To the East Coast they were $11,523. The same box to northern Europe cost $3,726, and that price has been falling since July. Xeneta's chief analyst says the US rates have now peaked, but will not collapse.
The September jobs report added 29,000 jobs and cut 60,000 from the two months before. Inside it, insurance carriers and the businesses around them lost jobs for the 11th month running. They now employ about 90,000 fewer people than in May 2025, a faster fall than in any comparable stretch in data going back to 1990. In the industry's own hiring survey, carriers keep saying the opposite.
Caterpillar said on Wednesday it will invest about $1 billion in a new plant in Sanford, North Carolina, to build more compact track loaders and telehandlers. Lee County and the City of Sanford have approved up to $85.5 million in incentives. The condition is that the company keeps at least 1,950 full-time jobs. It will not add any beyond the 600 hired this year.
The hires rate has sat between 3.1 and 3.5 per cent every month since March 2024, a pace last seen outside the pandemic in 2013. Quits are at 1.9 per cent. Yet real consumer spending rose 0.6 per cent in August while real disposable income did not grow, and the saving rate fell to 4.1 per cent. This week's data describe a labour market that has stopped moving and households that have kept spending anyway.
Shell and its four partners have taken the final investment decision on LNG Canada's second phase, which will double the Kitimat plant from 14 to 28 million tonnes a year. Neither the joint venture's release nor Shell's gives a capital cost, and Shell says commercial operation will begin in the early 2030s.
Four Automattic directors formed a special committee on 9 September and voted to place chief executive Matt Mullenweg on a paid leave of absence. He was out of the chair, by the company's own count, for 33 hours and 20 minutes. On 25 September the company told staff it has a new board: four directors, none of whom were on it three weeks ago, and none of whom can outvote him.
Initial claims for unemployment insurance fell to 197,000 in the week ending 19 September, the Labor Department reported on Thursday, with the insured unemployment rate at 1.1 per cent. Challenger, Gray & Christmas counts 155,126 announced job cuts in technology through August, up 52 per cent on last year and 29 per cent of every cut announced in the United States. Both numbers are correct, and the reason they do not collide is the denominator.
Paramount Skydance has settled the antitrust suit twelve states brought against its $110 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery. The remedies are promises about behaviour: thirty films a year in cinemas, with $30 million owed for each one short. The number that explains the timing is a different one. From 1 October, every day the deal stays open costs Paramount about $7 million.
Delaware's own registry recorded 334,461 new business entity formations in 2025, against 289,810 the year before and 298,165 the year before that. More than 2.28 million entities are now on its books, and nearly 70 percent of last year's US initial public offerings chose to incorporate there. The state amended its corporation law anyway.
Former 21 Air staff say they raised safety concerns years before the Miami overrun. The departing safety director emailed the owner in 2021 that "everywhere I looked there are issues." The former head of the pilots' union says he was fired in 2022 for pressing it, and has a federal whistleblower suit. The company disputes the claims.