All great consumer freakouts happen twice: the first time as farce, and the second time, well, they’re still a farce.

Surging prices, dwindling supply, and hoarding of a household basic. The Covid-induced Great Toiler Paper Freakout of 2020 – far from one of the more significant hardships of the pandemic – could possibly return as a trade-war induced variant. A large amount of US toilet paper is made in America, but a huge amount of the raw paper pulp used to manufacture it comes from Canada.

And in the spiralling US-Canada trade war, Canada is now set to put a 2-50% tariff on US-made toilet paper and facial tissue in response to US tariff hikes on imported Canadian paper goods. US retailers like Costco are likely to be hit with higher costs: the bulk-goods purveyor sources the majority of its paper products from Canada, the Guardian reports. Procter & Gamble, which owns Charmin, said last year it was raising prices in part due to tariffs. 

Stocks dipped ever so slightly on Wednesday. 

Nvidia releases better-than-expected quarterly earnings and the stock falls afterwards. If that sounds a bit familiar, there’s a good reason: going into Wednesday’s aftermarket earnings release, that is precisely what has happened for each of the last four quarters, as Sherwood News’ Luke Kawa wrote in the Entrypoint newsletter. 

At first, nothing much seemed to have changed: Nvidia reported earnings per share of $2.22 and revenue of $96.22 billion after the market closed yesterday afternoon, ahead of Wall Street’s expectations of $2.10 in earnings per share and $92.17 billion in revenue. In response, the stock dipped. 

But then, Nvidia’s chief financial officer Collette Kress dropped a bombshell. On the company’s post-earnings conference calls, she said executives expected the company’s fiscal-year 2028 revenue to rise by a staggering 70%, a massive increase over the analyst consensus of 45%, as tabulated by Bloomberg. And that huge increase, Kress noted, was despite a “supply constrained outlook.” In other words, if supply constraints ease, things could be even better. 

In response, the shares turned green after hours. 

Heading into Nvidia’s earnings, investors might not yet have been taking the AI boom for granted, but they are at least getting very used to it. Entrypoint cited Joseph Niles of Macro Risk Advisors pointing out that the implied move for Nvidia shares ahead of its earnings release was “the lowest in the AI era.” Investors had arguably been stuck on a bit of a hedonic treadmill, and a combination of muted performance heading into earnings and the Krees bombshell of operation optimism seems to have recalibrated Wall Street’s tastebuds.

— Ben Walsh

…and it’s not being complacent. After reporting record revenue for the first half of the year, the Danish toy builder says it’s increasing investments in sustainability and new products like “software-enabled bricks,” the Financial Times reports.