Why It Feels Harder to Get Ahead in 2025
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Hello and welcome to the TLDR podcast, a show about the culture, gossip, and business of money. And this week, you can't make an inflation omelet without breaking a few eggs.

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Sarah Rieger is the business and markets correspondent for the Webby award-winning TLDR newsletter. Sarah, how much can I ask to be invited to Matt's bachelor party before it gets awkward? I think you just have to keep asking until he invites you. You have to make it awkward. That's the way in. Right. I support you in this quest. Okay. We have an incredible show for you this week, which I say every week, but this time I really mean it. We're going to talk about why the price of eggs in Canada is so freakishly low and

And why the price of gold is so freakishly high, and is it a good investment? And then why does it feel so much harder to get ahead, even when on paper it looks like it shouldn't? And to get to all of that, we'll ask a question we always start with, which gets at the most interesting stories about money at the moment. Matthew, who is making or losing money right now that is interesting to you?

Gold investors or anyone that holds gold has been making a killing. It's the best performing asset class of the year. All right. Are you talking about like it's better than like the stock market? Is it better than Nvidia? Is it better than Bitcoin? Like how good is it doing? It's better than any stock, major stock markets, Bitcoin. It's up about 10% on the year. That's just since Jan 1st. This 10% move comes off of basically it's been a furious year for gold where it's been up 50%.

When did the gold rally start? I mean, the gold rally started, you know, basically at the beginning of time and has continued ever since then. How about the most recent uptick? The most recent uptick started, call it early 2023, but then it really like accelerated over the last year. Like, you know, September to now has been just a furious six months for gold.

Okay. If I were to put $1,000 into gold in September, how much money would I have right now? You would have $1,220. If you put up $1,000 into gold last March, you would have $1,525. That's like a pretty great return on a pretty mature investment that's been around forever and isn't entirely speculative.

Let me ask you this. Is the gold market mostly just like people putting quote unquote gold in their portfolios? Is it the people who are buying bullion at Costco, which apparently a lot of people are actually doing? Is it people buying jewelry? Like what is the actual gold market? The gold market's actually like

All of the above. About, you know, 50% of the demand or buying of gold every year is for jewelry. About 25% is governments buying, you know, mostly physical gold and keeping it like central banks. And about 25% is individuals like me and you buying jewelry.

gold both directly by literally buying gold bars or buying funds that hold gold for you. So like gold ETFs or something like that.

Okay. Why did the price go up? You know, or what are the mechanisms that drove that rally? So there's a big debate on the internet about why gold is up with, you know, lots of assertions and conspiracy theories and everyone bringing in their own, you know, opinions. As far as I can see, I think there's like three big reasons. Like one is macro, which is basically that, you know, interest rates are down. You have less reason to hold cash versus gold.

Okay, let's take just that small explanation. In the world as we expect it, when interest rates are high, the value of gold goes down because people are looking to make money on their cash in a relatively conservative way. And when interest rates are high, it's like, great, I can just put my money in a high interest whatever and get paid. But when interest rates are going down...

That looks less attractive. And one of the places people look to make that return is gold. They're like, you know, I was happy to put my money in the high interest savings account versus gold when it was high interest. But like when it's a low interest savings account, like, man, I'd rather just hold the gold. What's sort of interesting to me is that like gold prices have accelerated over the last couple of months when like rates have stopped coming down as quickly. And so it seems like there's like something else going on. What else?

So the big dynamic is that like central banks around the world have like ramped up their gold purchases. If you look at the top 10 countries buying gold over the last year, like nearly half of them are on the front lines of the Ukraine-Russia war and or like nominal Russian allies. And so like you've had this very clear shift in like these governments behavior, like deciding, hey, look, instead of like buying like U.S. bonds or something like that, I want gold because that is further afield from the core

clutches of like, I don't know, the U.S. government sanctions or like the U.S. financial system. It's like a government level version of like the paranoid, you know, gold bug who doesn't want to put his money in stocks and wants to put it in like gold bars under his bed.

And then the third point is there's been this continued ongoing demand from just like individuals who, as far as I can see, have just been burned by several years of high inflation and rising prices and have, you know, a ongoing desire to keep their wealth in something that's stable and not going to get inflated away. It's funny. I paid my way through university by working at a silver store. I assistant managed a silver jewelry store. And the guy that owned it,

He could not believe why gold was more valuable than silver. He was like, silver is actually rarer to mine in some ways. It has more like commercial uses. It's hardier. Yeah, it is not like the most useful metal. Like very little gold is some of it is used industrial purposes, but it's like low single digits of the demand every year. But yeah, you're right. It really just has come to hold this outside its place in our head. And it's really just people's perception of it.

So in a weird way, the people who are buying gold as some sort of absolute value thing is a little misleading because in a sense, it's a worthless soft metal. Its importance is mostly nostalgic and emotional.

And they're just betting that that nostalgia and emotion will continue in the future. But this is the thing, which is like, you know, gold has held its value exceptionally well over time. It's like there's like some studies that came out and like actually tried to say, like, how well has gold held up its value since like 2000 years ago? And like an ounce of gold got you 350 loaves of bread back then and like roughly would get you the same amount now.

So maybe betting that humans will continue to be emotional, nostalgic humans in the future is not a bad bet. Why the hell is that gold?

Sarah, you're up. Who is making or losing money that's interesting to you right now? Well, I've been seeing all of these memes on social media about just how much money Americans are spending on eggs. Last month, egg prices were up 15%, and they're up more than 238% in the last four years. So I've seen these photos circulating of, like, New York corner stores selling single eggs in bags. And all of this is so weird to me because egg prices in Canada...

haven't changed. Are you flexing on American egg buyers? Oh, 100%. I feel like anything Canada has over the U.S. right now, let's take it. Yeah, no, like there's no like, oh, maybe we should be nice about this. No. So let me ask you this.

Egg prices are really high right now because of the sort of remnants of an inflationary period that we've gone through. But also in America, they're really high right now because of the bird flu. Farmers are having to kill entire flocks of chickens, which of course limits the supply of eggs. Another great economic principle, lower supply equals higher demand, higher price. Why are these ironclad economic principles not at play in Canada?

Well, like we have bird flu up here too. It's not like we have like some super strong chickens that are resilient to this. One part of it is our farms are smaller. The average Canadian egg farm has just 28,000 birds. American farms have millions. So when an outbreak happens up here, you know, it's a kind of smaller hit to the overall industry. The bigger reason is because of this controversial system that regulates how many eggs are sold and what price they're sold at that I think Canadians love to debate over called supply management.

Supply management sounds like the least popular class at an MBA program, but also very important. Every economist needs to take that class. Do most people know what supply management is? If you went out to a bar in your town and sat down and you're like, supply management, would everyone be like, yeah, man? Or would they be like, what?

I think especially in my area, they'd be like, yeah, man, it's something like growing up in an Alberta household with like farmers in my family. This is the sort of thing like, you know, an uncle or a cousin would like fight about at the dinner table. But I also think a lot of people don't really understand how the system works. Good, because now we're going to explain how the system works. Sarah, tell us how supply management works when it comes to farming and eggs and stuff.

Supply management is Canada's answer to the question of how do you prevent huge swings in prices of food staples like dairy or eggs when a crisis happens, like say a drought or a pandemic. What it basically looks like is controls on food.

how many, say, eggs are imported, how many are produced, and how much producers can charge for them. This system dates back to the 1930s to 1960s, and both Canadian and U.S. farms actually had the same problem. Basically, as more people were moving to cities and tech advancements made it easier and more efficient to farm...

The system of family farms where you were just kind of making enough food for yourself and your immediate neighbors switched over to more of an industrial style like mass-produced farming. And

that transition meant prices of dairy and eggs got really chaotic. Sometimes there was just way too much food being produced, and farmers didn't know if they'd be able to get the same price for their eggs or if that price would even be enough to cover their costs of production. So the way the U.S. decided to handle things was by subsidizing the farms, like basically paying out cash to farmers out of tax dollars. But Canada decided to set up a different system instead.

Right, right. So if anyone wants to tell the story that Canada went socialist and America went free market, not exactly true because the government in America is still cutting big checks to farmers for eggs or poultry that they may not have even been able to produce. And then in Canada, it's more like you're going to be able to know the price of the eggs that you're going to be selling and you're going to be able to plan how many eggs you're going to be producing.

Yeah, the idea was to create stability both for farmers and for consumers as well. It sounds like sort of centralized economic quasi-socialist scheme that I would love and Matthew would hate. Surprisingly, like, I'm actually...

pro-farming regulation and supply management. I personally think that the way that the U.S. has been doing it, where you just provide a big subsidy and over time that ensures oversupply in the market, which keeps food abundant and prices down, is a better approach to it. But this is a case where it seems like actually choosing the distributors and preventing them from raising their prices is

might work. The reason like you don't want necessarily full free markets in food is the similar reason why you might not want full free markets, you know, between all countries in that like having an abundant food supply is like extremely important to the stability of your economy and country. And that's something that even if it's not economically optimal, you might be willing to pay a little bit for. And that's what both of these systems do. Right.

I do think some of the proponents of supply management are a little bit louder right now because this is kind of like making their case. They're saying, hey, look at this. We have a problem and we have stability. But free market economists really hate supply management. They prefer competition to stability.

They say opening up Canada to more imports, strapping quotas would increase supply, which they say would make dairy and eggs cheaper and also lead to more choice for consumers. One of the complaints I've heard about it, I think still really stands, is farmers in other industries that aren't protected by it kind of wonder why it only applies to eggs and dairy. You know, I've talked to pork producers, for one, who have just experienced like

massive swings in their prices and who have been like, if we're going to make bacon, like I'm not even going to make enough to cover the cost of raising my pigs. So I think it's also interesting to question like what we consider a staple and kind of what industries have the power to protect their prices and their livelihoods like this. Yeah, it shows your food priorities. Sarah, let me ask you this. What came first? I think it's clear. It's the egg. ♪

You can't make a tomlet without breaking some gregs. Okay, for the final segment today, we are going to be tackling a big issue. And we're going to bring in some experts who've done some work on it.

Jared Sullivan is the editor of the TLDR newsletter and the author of Valley So Low. Jared, welcome back to the show. Devin, glad to be here. And Jared is joined today by Andrew Thompson, who is a journalist and TLDR contributor, as well as being the Fast Company data editor. Hello, Andrew. Hi. So the TLDR newsletter took on one of, if not the essential economic questions of our times recently.

one that turned out to be a little more complicated than it seemed. Jared, what did you find out? We wanted to answer a question that on its surface seems pretty simple. And that question is, is it harder now for Canadians to get ahead financially than it was in the past? Yeah, I think that's a huge question because I think it's an essential argument that happens on the internet all the time. Where young people are like, it's so hard to get ahead. And older people are like, cry more. I'm sorry, you can't have steak delivered to your house.

My grandmother had to share an apple with 14 children. Exactly. So a few months ago, Sierra wrote a really great story for us about the generational wealth gap in Canada. And she found...

Somewhat surprisingly, that millennials have more wealth adjusted for inflation than either their parents or their grandparents did at the same point in their career. So in other words, the typical millennial in their mid-30s has more money and assets than their parents had when they were at the same age, like when they were in their mid-30s.

Okay, so in some respect, one would think, okay, case closed. Shut up, millennials. Yeah, so that's right. But the story was a little unsatisfying. According to all the sorts of polls, Canadians, you know, they don't believe their kids are going to grow up and be better than them, right? And so when there's that many people telling you something, there's probably some truth behind it, right? The question is not just

wealth, how much assets or cash you have. It's also a question of upward mobility. And that's really where the anxiety seems to be around. What's upward mobility? What does that mean? It's whether you are going to do better than your parents. Is there a path for you to improve your financial standing in this world? In some way, it's a sense of hope, really, right? It's like, I'm going to move forward. I'm not going to stagnate. How do you...

Study that. We thought we would look at the stuff that tend historically to improve upward mobility. Education, you know, rent. Can you buy a car? Those things have huge, huge, huge impacts on your wealth and on your trajectory in life. So we brought in Andrew to help us kind of figure out what's going on below the surface. I'm very excited to have Andrew on the show. I've been a fan of his work at Fast Company and other places. Okay, what do you measure first?

Okay, so we had Andrew dive into how much certain things cost relative to overall inflation and to average wages throughout Canada. Right. So according to the data I assembled, between 2000 and 2022, average income roughly doubled.

And this has outpaced inflation as a whole. And this inflation is not evenly distributed. And in fact, it's the very things we associate most with getting ahead, with building a life, with securing equity and building wealth that have either outpaced that income metric or have at least kept pace with it.

And definitely outpaced other prices like cannabis and TVs and clothing and so on. What segments of the economy is inflation growing faster than income? So one of the big ones is university tuition, which has outpaced income for most of the past 25 years. And then the biggest one is housing, particularly purchasing a house, not rent, which is

It is unambiguously broken away from growth and income throughout this entire period, beginning in 2000. Right. So there's a bunch of stuff that has gotten cheaper, relatively speaking. There's a bunch of stuff that's gotten more expensive comparatively.

even outpacing gains in income. But there is one thing that is glaringly, horribly out of sync. Is that correct? That's right. Yeah. While income has roughly doubled from 2000 to about the present,

housing prices have increased by more than 400%. And that rate of growth has reached a, if you look at the graph, like it's just reached this near vertical increase since 2020. I asked Andrew if he could put housing on the same chart as everything else, right, to show. But the line for housing is so steep and so severe that it just would not fit. It eclipses everything else. So this is not a newsflash, but it's,

It certainly explains all the bad vibes. So you're kind of saying, essentially, when people are complaining, what they're really talking about is housing. I mean, I wouldn't say that it's just housing. I think housing is the one that is increasingly becoming the most impossible. Like, I think that housing is really this anchor between things that allow you to exist with security in the world and reality.

this other category that seems to have, you know, little or nothing to do with that. Right. So if you could create two different categories, one, all the stuff in the economy that has become relatively less expensive and all the stuff in the economy that has become relatively a lot more expensive.

Can you just tell us what those groups are, just very basically? Yeah. The way I think about this is that the stuff that is associated with being in the world and building robust societies, those have become more expensive. And all of the things that are arguably more associated with a kind of retreat into media and this kind of self-indulgence, those have become cheaper.

So yeah, like TVs, you go to Costco or whatnot, you can get a huge TV now for very, very little money, like 200 something bucks, which that's cool, right? Like having a big TV is nice. Same thing with clothes, but cheaper clothes, it doesn't make you feel better about your standing in the world. I think the other thing too, when we talk about this stuff, like, oh, wages have gone up a little bit, but housing has gone up so much more is like those changes in price, I guess, aren't felt evenly by everyone. Like

like when you actually start breaking stuff down like by income like high income earners low income earners you probably aren't seeing a ton of wage gains if you're a low income earner right like you are not benefiting from i don't know canada's increasing productivity or whatever in the same way but you are feeling those increases in cost of housing and also like increases in some cost of like staple foods and energy too like you're trying to stat can between 2019 and 2024

low-income earners are now spending 11% more, so 94%. And actually, for high-income earners, they're spending less of their money covering basic needs. So you're not noticing it as much.

Andrew, at a basic level, what surprised you about the data? Like, was it everything you expected? So for most of the past 24 years, childcare had also pretty much kept up with the rate of income growth until the Canadian government instituted their $10 childcare reform that's currently being rolled out around the country. What surprised me was to see that the...

initiatives of the Canadian government have, in fact, had such a strong impact on something like childcare that you could see that price index basically fall off a cliff. That was really cool. So even though this initiative has only been implemented into a few provinces and has yet to be rolled out nationwide, it was still enough to more than put a dent into this childcare index that Statistics Canada keeps. So like...

Child care is incredibly expensive. It's outpacing inflation. The Canadian government implements a plan to subsidize child care to cap it at a certain cost for people. And suddenly it's not a problem anymore. It slides down dramatically. And I should say child care can still be very, very hard to find in certain cities. There is that caveat. But if you zoom out to the most macro data, which Andrew did, that policy definitely seems to be working.

Sarah, when you looked at this data, was there anything that was surprising to you? Is it a boring answer to just say no? It's all anyone talks about, right? It's your daily experience. You hear people, I don't know, the degree to which rent has outpaced incomes in most major cities in the last couple of years has been really staggering. So if you're constantly hearing from your friends that...

Their rent has gone up $400 this year and then another $150 the next year. It's a lot. It shows how data can be cherry-picked, too, when you look at this stuff. You can kind of tell one story by being like, oh, look, incomes are up. But does that actually mean most people are having a measurably better time with cost of living? No, no, it doesn't.

Okay, Sarah Rieger, what did we learn? We learned that the only asset that rallied more than U.S. eggs this year is gold. We learned that Canada stabilizes its egg prices, but not its bacon. And we learned that it might be easier to get ahead if you didn't need to afford a place to live.

That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. The show is sponsored by Well Simple. It is made by me, Devin Friedman, Matt Karras, Sarah Rieger, Matilda Erfolino, Leah Fetter, Jared Sullivan, with help from Juanita Leon, Allison Hopkins, Eva Cruz, fact-checking by Brennan Doherty, theme music by Andy Huckvale, and engineering by Emma Munger. Special thanks this week to Andrew Thompson.

The TLDR podcast is offered by Wealthsimple Media Incorporated and is for informational purposes only. The content in the TLDR podcast is not investment advice, a recommendation to buy or sell assets or securities, and does not represent the views of Wealthsimple Financial Corporation or any of its other subsidiaries or affiliates. Wealthsimple Media Incorporated does not endorse any third-party views referencing this content. More information at wealthsimple.com slash TLDR.