One of Canada’s most famous entertainers made what many would have seen as a surprising decision earlier this month. 

Adam Copeland, the 49-year-old professional wrestler known to most of his fans as Edge, left WWE, the dominant sports entertainment company, to join All Elite Wrestling, an upstart promotion started in 2019. 

“Part of coming here is that I want to contribute,” Copeland said at a press conference. “I want to help. And I just felt like here, I’d really be able to do that, and have the opportunity to do that.” 

I get that. Copeland captured the main reasons I’m joining The Logic. I want to contribute to an effort to strengthen the business to which I’ve devoted my adult life. I want to help people make sense of the mass disruption that will affect everything and everyone for years to come. The Logic is the best opportunity to do that.  

Like Copeland, I was in a good spot. The Financial Post, the Postmedia title I led for the past two years, dates to 1907, when it was founded by John Bayne Maclean, one of Canada’s great media disruptors. It was an honour to steward a publication with such a rich history. 

But I didn’t get into journalism to secure a steady job. I joined Bloomberg News when few knew who Michael Bloomberg was. I took a pay cut to join The Globe and Mail because I wanted more creative freedom. I left the Globe because I had a chance to live in India. I agreed to try management because I had the skills to lead the Financial Post’s pivot to digital. 

I could move around like that because the news business was still relatively dynamic. It’s no longer like that. Journalism is in trouble, demonstrated mostly recently by Nordstar Capital’s decision to put its Metroland Media division in bankruptcy protection. 

One of the reasons that capitalism trumps the other –isms is that entrepreneurs are always welcome, provided they have enough guile and money to join the game. In the early 1900s, John Bayne Maclean was an example of how entrepreneurial spirit can lead to a society that is better informed. Maclean saw opportunity and refused to be cowed by legacy players. 

Today, David Skok, The Logic’s founder and editor-in-chief, is attempting something similar. He and his team are committed to doing journalism the right way. They’ve built a newsroom dedicated to providing insight and context. They respect their readers and are committed to making a difference. They have remained stubbornly neutral during a moment when so many other media companies have chosen a side. 

Some people asked me why I would leave legacy media and its audiences for a smaller publication that protects most of its intellectual property behind a paywall. My response to those people: why wouldn’t I? 

The world has become a confusing place for those of us who came of age in Canada in the 1990s. Everything was supposed to have been sorted. The Cold War was over, and the good guys won. Globalization would make China a friend—and exporters rich. Economic prosperity would be as simple as balancing the budget and keeping inflation at two per cent. For a few minutes, Canada was an energy superpower, and we got a little drunk on all that could mean. Google and Facebook and Amazon were going to make the world a better place and we crossed our fingers that they would establish outposts here. 

History has caught up to us. War has returned to Europe and the Middle East, while the military buildup in Asia suggests we could be an itchy trigger finger away from deadly combat throughout the Eastern Hemisphere. Geopolitical risk is now something that decision makers at all levels must take into account. 

One of the most talked-about economics books of the past few years, The Great Demographic Reversal by Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradham, argues that the fast economic growth and slow inflation of the past few decades probably had more to do with demand from American boomers and globalization’s unlocking of cheap labour than the brilliance of finance ministers, central bankers and superstar chief executives. The most dangerous bout of inflation in four decades suggests they are right. 

Stephen Poloz, the former Bank of Canada governor, reckons that an aging population, technological change, extreme inequality, record levels of debt and climate change are about to start crashing into each other, generating mass disruption the way colliding tectonic plates cause earthquakes. He’s skeptical that the current crop of politicians are up to the challenge of implementing policies that will help, adding yet another layer of uncertainty.

This is where readers can expect to find me. I’ve learned enough to know that I know nothing, but I’d like to think that I’ve picked up just enough to do a decent job of separating what matters from what doesn’t. 

The crypto cult could eventually attract enough believers to rule the financial world, but for now, the central banks are the gods of the global economy and financial markets. I’ll be spending a lot of time writing about monetary policy and the macroeconomic forces that determine the course of interest rates and central bankers’ ongoing battle with inflation, a threat to humanity’s well-being that they thought they had vanquished. 

For an extended period at the start of the millennium, finance and industry ministers had largely taken themselves out of the game, convinced all they could do for the economy was balance their budgets and cut corporate taxes. But economists such as Mariana Mazzucato led a rethink in the proper role of the state in stimulating economic progress, given that the era of freer markets and smaller government had done nothing to arrest climate change and had resulted in wider gaps between the rich and poor.

Industrial policy is now back, as governments in Canada allocate hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidize everything from battery plants to satellites. But is handing over hundreds of billions of dollars to companies such as Volkswagen Group the best way to foster an innovation economy? I’ll let my readers decide for themselves, but I commit to giving them lots to think about. 

My background is writing about macroeconomics, in part because that’s what sells. Interest rates affect all of us, so there’s a bigger readership for stories about the forces that influence monetary policy than articles about strategic decisions taken by individual companies. However, I’m mindful of angel investor Naval Ravikant’s critique of macroeconomics on an episode of the Knowledge Project podcast in 2017, calling it “junk science,” while declaring that “microeconomics and game theory are fundamental.” 

I don’t know if Ravikant is right, but he isn’t entirely wrong. There’s a disconnect between the mathematical models that macroeconomists use to explain how the world works, and what happens in the real world. The danger of this disconnect was exposed by the Great Recession in 2008–2009, and then again by the way the economics establishment was surprised by the way inflation surged after the pandemic. 

We can do better. For more than two decades, I’ve listened to executives and founders tell me economic conditions don’t affect them, an attitude that I assume is being adjusted in real time by the bond markets. So, Ravikant was onto something, but he hasn’t discovered the answer. Maybe there’s no answer to be found, but we’ll go looking. 

Kevin Carmichael is The Logic’s economics columnist and editor-at-large. He has spent more than two decades covering economics, business and finance for outlets including Bloomberg News, The Globe and Mail and the Financial Post, where he also served as editor-in-chief.