The Daily Chase: Big bank earnings parade continues

Here are five things you need to know this morning.

RBC results: The earnings parade at Canada’s big banks continues today, with Royal Bank revealing quarterly numbers that mostly surpassed expectations. At Canada’s biggest lender, a stronger-than-expected performance from its capital markets and wealth management units was enough to offset an uptick in loan-loss provisions and higher costs overall. Adjusted earnings at Canada’s biggest company came in at $2.85 per share. That was higher than the $2.80 that analysts were expecting, although that was six per cent lower than the figure for the same quarter last year. Just as they did at Scotia and BMO on Monday, loan-loss provisions at RBC ticked higher to $813 million. That was higher than analysts were expecting, as well as an uptick from $720 million last quarter and $542 million a year ago. The bank also gave an update on its takeover of HSBC Canada. After numerous delays, the deal has obtained all regulatory approvals required and is set to be finalized next month. And while RBC has trumpeted the cost savings and synergies it will enjoy from the takeover, the costs of those benefits are creeping up. In its earnings release, the bank says that as of the end of January, it has racked up $600 million in integration and transaction costs for the deal. It anticipates another $900 million to come, which will bring those costs to $1.5 billion — higher than the $1 billion initially forecast. And that doesn’t include the deal’s actual price tag of $13.5 billion.

TMX costs rise another 10%: Another day, another multi-billion-dollar cost overrun for the TMX pipeline. According to paperwork filed with the Canada Energy Regulator on Monday, the cost of the massive pipeline project to bring Canadian crude oil from Edmonton to export terminals in Vancouver has ballooned by another $3 billion. The price tag now sits at just over $34 billion, an increase of 10 per cent from the last estimate in May, and a massive escalation for the project which was pegged at about $5 billion when it was first envisioned in 2013. It’s even more than double the projected cost when the government took over the project a few years later. The timeline for the pipeline to actually start transporting oil is still on track to happen some time this quarter, but for a project that has been plagued by delays and cost overruns for its entire existence, another $3 billion is just par for the course.

Apple scraps its car plans: After a decade of planning and billions in sunk costs, Apple has quietly scrapped its plans to build its own self-driving autonomous car, Bloomberg reports. The move came as a surprise to the more than 2,000 people who’ve been working on the project internally for several years, most of whom will be moved over to the company’s generative A.I. unit instead. The idea that the company which revolutionized the portable electronic industry might turn its focus to the automotive space has been a tantalizing one for years, so it’s telling that a company with such big influence — and a US$162 billion cash pile — has decided it’s not worth the cost or effort. When the news came out late Tuesday, in his typical understated fashion, Tesla CEO Elon Musk celebrated the decision, publishing a saluting emoji and a cigarette on his X social media platform. It’s not hard to see why Musk likes the move, since the idea of an army of autonomous electric vehicles traversing the country 24/7 has been a major part of the sky high valuation of the electric car company he heads up. With Apple giving up on the idea, the highway is wide open for Tesla to plow ahead on that pipe dream.