Anyone who was hoping for a huge resurgence in Canadian consumerism woke up to some bad news today as a new poll from Canadian bank CIBC (TSE:CM) suggested otherwise. The poll did little to CIBC’s own fate, though, and shares were up fractionally in Monday morning’s trading.
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The top priority for Canadians in 2025, according to the CIBC poll, was paying down debt. CIBC’s annual poll, titled Financial Priorities, revealed that Canadians are still very much concerned about rising prices on household goods, along with still-high interest rates. Thus, they’re working to pay down their debt, and not incur new debt, a fiscally-responsible combination that will take them off the firing line of their biggest worries as much as possible.
Meanwhile, the second priority dovetails into the first: keeping their bills paid. Further, Canadians are clearly worried about a recession, as the poll found two out of three respondents concerned about the impact of same. On the plus side, though, about half of the respondents believed they were ready to take on an “unexpected financial hardship.”
Unhappy Fliers Ahead
But CIBC will have worries of its own in 2025, and they started off with a bang and that right early with word of a new class-action lawsuit. Also named in the suit were Aeroplan and TD Bank (TSE:TD), and focuses on issues of bonus points cardholders should have received, but did not.
Cardholders with the banks in question expected to receive “Welcome Bonus Points,” but apparently—for “thousands” of Aeroplan card holders, noted a report from Yuvagalam—lost them after receipt. The points were “clawed back,” whenever the card holders applied for a second Aeroplan Visa card at either of the two banks mentioned. This, in turn, prompted the lawsuit.
Is CIBC Stock a Good Buy?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Moderate Buy consensus rating on TSE:CM stock based on four Buys, three Holds and one Sell assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 49.23% rally in its share price over the past year, the average TSE:CM price target of C$99.38 per share implies 9.22% upside potential.
