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Canadian Economist: Trump’s Tariffs Are A Gift To Mark Carney

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Canadian Economist: Trump’s Tariffs Are A Gift To Mark Carney

The U.S.-Canada trade conflict has intensified, with Canada retaliating against U.S. tariffs on steel, aluminum, and other goods by imposing equivalent tariffs, signaling a broader economic realignment. Despite the immediate economic strain on Canada—projected to lose 0.3–0.4% of GDP growth—this standoff is accelerating a strategic shift toward trade diversification, including closer ties with the European Union. Concurrently, global education data reveals a troubling decline in literacy, math, and science scores across countries over the past decade, with a significant drop in students' performance attributed to increased AI use and digital media consumption. Research indicates that daily AI users perform up to 28 points worse than non-users, raising concerns about weakening critical thinking and long-term economic productivity. Experts caution that while AI may dominate future work environments, its overuse in education undermines foundational skills like analysis and writing. This trend, combined with rising educational inequality—especially in the U.S.—threatens societal and economic resilience. Meanwhile, soaring national debt and interest payments in the U.S.—now exceeding $1.25 trillion annually—highlight a broader fiscal crisis, with long-term interest costs projected to double, threatening the stability of public finances. These interlinked issues suggest a global shift toward economic and educational reconfiguration, driven by technological disruption and policy misalignment.

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The major indices declined on tensions in the Middle East, Brent crude rose above $99 per barrel, the yield on tenure treasuries climbed and finally SpaceX rose 4%, amid reports that it's waiting in the NASDAQ 100 may increase this month when the index rebalances. Okay, what else is happening? Canada is striking back against the US with tariffs of its own. The new levees range from 15 to 50%, covering around $20 billion worth of American goods, tariffs on US steel, aluminum and iron products doubled to 50%, and other targeted products include furniture, clothing, appliances and dairy. The move is payback for the 50% tariffs that Trump levied against Canada last month, trade talks between the two nations fell apart at the end of August and now Mark Carney is pledging to quote "hit back" against Trump's bullying, quote "dollar for dollar rate for rate". Joining us to discuss what this escalation means for the US and for Canada was speaking with Mike Moffett, Canadian economist and founding director of the Missing Middle Initiative. Mike, it's great to see you again, thanks for joining us. I'd love to just start at the very beginning. We haven't talked about the Canada US trade war for a while, but it's an ongoing situation. How did this all begin? How did it flare up again over the summer and how do we arrive at this moment? It's a great question. I think Canadians are asking themselves that question, like what do we do to deserve this? But this has been happening before Trump was elected the first time, or at least before he was inaugurated the first time in 2017. There have been these flare-ups from time to time. We've seen the US put additional tariffs, particularly under the second Trump administration on a variety of goods. There was negotiations over the summer and Canada walked away from those. It's not entirely clear what the tipping point was. Part of it is Canada not wanting to negotiate through the media. But sounded like there were some last-minute changes that the Trump administration put on a deal between Canada and the US, that the Carney administration just couldn't abide to, so we find ourselves here today. So those negotiations break down. Mark Carney walks away from them because something that we're not totally clear on wasn't going correctly, at least in his view. And then Trump's decision is tariffs. The negotiations were basically to take those tariffs off. So the Trump administration had threatened these $20 billion in tariffs. We had gone, Canada had gone to the administration to try and work out a deal. Then we walked back, again, it's kind of unclear why there's stories around what was in the deal in terms of automotive or Canada's ability to sign other trade deals. And like any other country, Canada wasn't just going to sit there when it had tariffs put on it. So the Carney administration kind of matched dollar for dollar. Some of those tariffs are basically reciprocal, so you put 50% on us, we'll put 50% on you. But others are a little bit more targeted towards swing states, towards areas where Canada often buys, not 100% of its imports from the US, where we have a little bit of choice to buy from, say, the US or Japan or the EU. So the idea is that we don't want to raise Canadian prices as much, but instead, if Canadians can buy from Japan or EU instead, that should dampen the effect of these tariffs. What is the economic impact of these tariffs at this point? How significant is it for the US economy and then also for the Canadian economy? Well, it's certainly a bigger hit for Canada, where we're proportionately smaller. I've seen Trevor Tum at the University of Calgary's estimated that if these continue for a year, we shave about 3 to 4/10th of a percent off of GDP growth, which isn't fantastic. Now, Carney is the beneficiary of a little bit of luck here, though, in terms of good timing. He's quite popular right now. He's ahead 16 points in the polls. One of Canada's biggest exports is oil, and the price of Western Canadian select has gone from about $50 a barrel prior to the actions in Iran to $80 a barrel. You never want to take a three-tenths of a point percentage point hit to GDP, but if you had to do it at some point, now's really not a bad time. It seems as though there's almost a stalemate here between who's going to back down and who's going, I guess, put their pride aside. I'm not sure if that's the right way to look at it. But would you expect that this is something that will continue for the foreseeable future? Well, I certainly hoped on. I hope the Canada and the US can come to a deal. I think there is some hope in Canada that the upcoming midterms might get the US to come forward with an agreement that we can live with. But in the meantime, we've got Prime Minister Karne going to the EU next week. We've heard rumblings of a deal between Canada and the EU, which is not quite at the level of EU membership, but a close integration with the two countries. So I think that's how Canada's playing it now that we still want a deal with the United States, but we're also exploring Plan B and trying to diversify our trade in the meantime. One of the most viral videos of the week, this week, has been a video that Trump posted on social media, on Truth Social, and it's like an AI-generated cartoonish video of him beating Mark Coney with a hockey stick on the ice. What is your reaction to that video? It's gone pretty viral. A lot of people are upset about it. How significant is it and what is Canada's reaction to that video? We're certainly not happy about it, but I think Canadians are trying to take the position that we just shouldn't take the bait, right, that this is an attempt to go to us. So it's one of those things where we start to get angry and then we go, okay, deep breaths. Let's just calm down. We don't, you know, this is what Trump is trying to get from Canadians. So let's calm a little bit, but we're certainly not happy about it. And there is, you know, ironically, when those things happen, there is kind of a rally around the flag and Coney himself gets more popular. So if the administration is trying to force Canada to sign the deal, this is probably the worst possible thing to do because it just makes Coney more popular in the eyes of Canadians and gives Coney more ability to back away from a bad deal. Yeah. That has certainly been my takeaway. It seems as though every time Trump tries to punch basically what looks like down on Mark Coney, because Canada is a smaller nation. It seems like he's trying to do this, make his bullying tactic or something. People just like Mark Coney more, they like Canada more. It seems like that is consistently what has been happening. We saw the same thing with changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America. It seems as though people are generally more supportive of the quote unquote enemy that Trump wants to make out of Canada. How popular at this point is Mark Coney and how much of that popularity is a function of Trump's attempts to bully him? I think quite a bit. That's right now. Now the latest polling I saw from Nanos has the Liberals, Mark Carney's party at 47%, the Conservatives at 31%, and like the UK, we are a multi-party country, so a 16-point lead is massive, and I think a lot of that is all of the folks who aren't necessarily conservatives and many conservatives are parking their votes with the Liberals right now. If you look at polling, the response to the counter tariffs, Canadians who are non-conservative voters support them 90-95%, it's overwhelming. You can't get Canadians to agree on 90-95% on anything. They agree on that, and even conservatives are about 50-50, so overall, I think Canadians like what the Prime Minister is doing and it's showing up in the polling results. There was also the viral image that Trump posted of a map of the U.S., but then it includes Canada and Mexico and Greenland, and it's got like a U.S. flag covering all of it, basically like all of this is ours. Is there anyone in Canada who likes him at this point? Does that even exist? It does. 15% of the population, and it's about half of those conservative voters that I mentioned, that there is a cohort that likes Trump, they tend to be quite conservative. They tend to have been frustrated about Canada. They've always wanted Canada to be more like the United States when it comes to taxation and social issues and so on. That does exist, but it's about an 85-15 split. I think most of us are quite upset with the Trump administration, and it has made us, unfortunately, more anti-American than we were a year or two ago. Just in terms of consequences and what this will actually mean for the global economy, you mention how Canada and the EU are now working on a new all-encompassing deal, seemingly as a response to the lack of partnership between the U.S. and Canada, and it seems as though the global order is re-routing itself away from the U.S. Would you say that that is the direction that we are headed as a global economy? Yeah, I think so, and here in Canada, even if we had a deal tomorrow, there's just so much uncertainty. The deal would feel like it was written in pencil, so investors and businesses are looking to diversify. Canada used to, about 80% of Canadian exports used to go to the United States a couple years ago, was down to 70, it's now down to about 67%. So oddly, the Trump administration has kind of done us a bit of a favor in a strange way, because we've always talked in Canada about the need to diversify our trade. And we're actually doing it now, so there is some irony here, as much as we hate the tariffs, we hate the hockey video memes, we are, it is kind of forcing us to do a bunch of things we probably should have done decades ago, but just never had the motivation to do it. What are some of the other consequences that you think will come out of this? I mean, is it possible that, for example, the relationship could never really be repaired? And what are the other long-term consequences? I think in the kind of short and medium term, I think we're going to see a shift in defense spending. I think that may come out of this, this EU deal, so there's been this debate in Canada for decades about buying the F-35, we might see that go away. I do think the Canadian-US relationship is repairable, but it's going to, it's going to take a while, it will take a few administrations of goodwill, but I do think our countries have too much in common to be forever at odds, but it certainly feels that way right now. This really does feel like we're going through a messy, angry divorce, and it does feel hard to reconcile, but I'm an optimist, I'm certainly hopeful that we can get through this. The legacy, ultimately, of Mark Carney will be in Canada. Well, it's tough. He's only been in office about a year and a half, but it's almost, you don't want to compare anybody to Winston Churchill, but it does kind of feel like this kind of wartime leader, which actually puts Carney in kind of a challenging position, because right now he's seen as the leader who can get us through this war, but if somebody's going to come around and become the clementately of the situation, once the war is over, so we'll kind of see where we are 20, 30 years from now. But I think that's how he's seen as the kind of steady hand, who's keeping us through this at a time of intense turmoil. All right. Our effort is Canadian Economist and Founding Director at the Missing Middle Initiative. Mike, always appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you for having me. After the break, why kids around the world are getting stupider. Are you a pet owner? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the US gets hit with a vet bill over $1,000, always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch comes in. 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This year's results reveal that average reading scores have fallen 28 points over the past decade equal to roughly a year and a half of schooling. Meanwhile, math scores are down 22 points and science roughly 10 points, all three, are the lowest averages that the OECD has ever recorded. America held up better than most countries, but that's not saying much. US reading scores fell 14 points. And the lowest score America has ever posted, math was flat, and exactly the OECD average and science was flat as well. The US also had one of the widest gaps between its highest and lowest scoring students of any country tested. So what does this mean for the American education system and what might it mean for the international economy? Here to answer these questions, we are speaking with John Byrne Murdock, columnist and. the Chief Data Reporter for the Financial Times. John, thank you for joining us on-profit markets. I'd love to just start with your reactions to this global education report card. Reading down 28 points in a decade, math down, 22, it seems like children, not just in America, but around the world are frankly getting stupider. And I guess the question is what that means for the rest of us. What do you think? Yeah, look, I mean, their numbers are very striking. It's really not very common that we see such a drastic deterioration in a massive international data set like this. And I think something that's particularly surprising this time is that three years ago when we got the equivalent data, the last batch of these results, a lot of people said right, things have got worse, but we've just been through a pandemic, schools were disrupted, you're going to expect some disruption to the learning process from that. Three years on instead of a partial recovery or even stability, we see sustained decline. The numbers you're talking about here, we're looking really at over the past decade and a decline equivalent to two years of lost education in mathematics and reading. These are really, really striking and really, meaningful. These are not just meaningless numbers, they reflect really measured measurable worst outcomes for young people and children around the world. As you say, the fact that this is so broad-based and in terms of the number of countries is really significant as well. This is not a clear story of a particular policy in a particular place. This is much, much, much more broad-based than that. So yeah, I think the concerned reactions we're seeing today are completely justified. So what do you think is driving this at this point? I mean, things were getting worse, and then recently they got dramatically worse. I see them a lot of it as COVID, technology, what are the reasons that this is happening? Yeah, look, there's a bunch of theories out there. Again, I think the significance of this is that there's real agreement that things are going wrong. So the OECD who produced these numbers have also put out some commentary accompanying this. This is not just sort of people looking for a negative alarming story. These are seasoned professionals in the education space who are saying that there are real signs of problems here. Some are pointing fingers, even a potential law for AI. So as part of this year, or last year's assessments this year's results, as part of this, they actually looked at the relationship between young people's AI use and their performance, and in one particular piece of analysis, they found that among children, so we're mainly talking about 15-year-olds here, so among 15-year-olds who are pretty regular users of AI, their ability to summarize educational texts was significantly worse than people who don't use AI. And even when they had tried to adjust for the kinds of things that might explain that, like maybe the people who use less AI are also from better off, more educated backgrounds, even after controlling that, there was a link there. So one possibility is that some of this is that just in the last year or two, some young people are using AI to help with their work, which that means whether it's taken away they struggle, that would match with a lot of results we've seen from other countries, other age groups, in terms of the impact AI has on people's ability to absorb and retain information. In addition, you mentioned COVID, now I certainly think it's possible that COVID is still playing a role in the sense that we did see that significant disruption three, four, five years ago in schools, some of that may have been caught back up, some of it may have maintained. There were other disruptions that have continued from as well, so a small number of students, of school students, stopped attending school regularly during their COVID lockdowns and never really got back into it. So all of that is going on, and then I think we do need to point to the role of the broader digital media, digital information environment. So again, this was something that the OACD picked up on in the report themselves. They found that an increasing share of young people when they're doing these tests are skimming through them super fast and then getting really bad results. So there's certainly evidence that changes in how people consume information, the endless sort of stream of nuggets of information that people now encounter on social media. That is very different to the longer form pieces of text that people need to analyse when doing maths, reading science exams. So all of these things do seem to be playing a role. So the reason I really wanted to have you want to talk about this, I mean this is not an education podcast, this is a market's podcast, we cover finance, we cover economics. But to me, this really is an economic story because if young people are getting superior, if their reading scores are going down, their math scores are going down, their science scores are going down, to me that seems like one of the biggest impacts that we'll see is in the future, we'll see a huge hit to say GDP growth and economic productivity. If we have a society of people who don't really know how to work together, how to communicate, how to solve whole problems in math and science and technology, then that to me sounds like an extremely unproductive society to me that has real impacts on the markets and has real impacts on basically everything. So I guess my question to you is, is this problem being taken as seriously as I see it by our leaders and to what extent are we taking measures to actually address it? It's definitely a serious problem but I would look in it perhaps in a more holistic view. I think this is a problem just anywhere in life where the ability to understand details to think about, trade-offs to think critically about the quality of information anywhere where that comes in, this is going to be an issue, so that is the economy, it affects the functioning of political systems, it affects how we interact with each other. I'm not a more perhaps controversial take as it were that I could give to this is that I think some of this stuff actually may matter less than we think for the economy, so an analysis I did recently for the FT. I looked at the fact that US rates among adults, rates of literacy in America are much lower than they are in the UK, but the American economy performs much much better than the British. The extreme version of this is that among the subset of the American adult population who are functionally illiterate, unable to read or understand even quite basic texts, they earn on average the same amount as the average Brit. So I think there is this sense now that what matters to drive the economy is how you're very, very top performers do educationally and in a country like the US where you in the past at least have taken in some of the most highly skilled, talented, brightest people ever in the world, those are the people who start the companies that shake the economy. So to be clear, I'm absolutely not saying that this is not a really important deterioration, I think it's massively important, it tells us that a lot of things are going wrong, but in terms of the impact on the economy, I'm actually not entirely sure how this will pan out, and I think it's in all of our interest that young people are getting the instruction they need and are able to absorb the information they need as I say in many, many, many domains of life, but weirdly it may actually be that the economy may be one of the last places that we see to start to show up. To that end though, it does seem to speak to a different economic problem, which is the inequality problem. If you have a smaller subset of individuals who are getting a good education, who are actually using their brains and then solving whole problems and then creating immense amounts of wealth, then that is technically good for GDP as a number, but it technically isn't great if the spoils are spread increasingly uneven lately across the population, which is indeed what we're seeing, but also more importantly, that is what we saw in this report too. I mean, the inequality of education was the number that stood out most for the US, nearly 300 points between the top and the bottom students in science. I'd be interested to get your perspective on the educational inequality that seems to be coming through in this report card, not so much for the other countries, but specifically for the United States. I think that's exactly right. I think inequality inequality is exactly the way that I would look at this, and we're seeing a broader widening of inequality in literacy, education, performance in the US, well beyond this result. The various other exams, assessments of reading in particular in the US that are done every year and have been done for decades show the bottom 10% really falling away. This shows up in many, many other exams that are being done in the US. So I think that's exactly right, that what we seem to be seeing in this era of greater exposure to digital risks, for example, and disruptions, it's the bottom 10%, 20%, who are really falling away from the rest. Again, that has implications to the economy, it has implications to politics, it has implications for participation in society overall, that I really don't think we're headed to a good place if you end up with one in 10, one in five young people and they become adults, and these people just do not or have not been equipped with the skills they need to navigate the complexity of modern life. I'd love to just focus on the AI problem as well. The report showed that daily AI users scored 28 points below those who never use AI, meaning that if you're using AI every day, you are about a year and a half behind your peers who are not using AI. To me, this is really an indictment of AI in schools. This has also become kind of an intense political topic here in New York City. Zora Mandani has opted to ban AI in schools, presumably for this reason. What are we to make of AI and its impacts on learning for children? Yeah, I think the evidence is starting to mount up on this one. So there was also a study a few weeks back out of the Chinese high schools and universities that showed that students who were using AI to help with their assessments of their homework. They looked like they were doing really well on the homework and these examinations struck the course of the year, but when it came to the final exam, when they didn't have AI, they performed really, really badly. We're seeing this in all sorts of settings. We've seen this come out from US universities as well. So I think at this point, there's a really solid case that relying on AI as part of the learning process is extremely risky in terms of it essentially being used as a crutch that when taking away people just collapse at the end. I think it's also just incredibly hard to enforce use of AI in the education setting where that doesn't happen. You can talk about having locked down versions of chat GPT, that kind of thing that encourage study hours. But ultimately, if someone wants to cheat, they're going to find a way to cheat. We've seen this with all sorts of different forms of educational technology over the years as well. It's a really, really fine tightrope to try and tread and we don't seem to be able to do that. I think as well we have this problem where a lot of the people in Silicon Valley who create these tools, they are people who have always worked really hard at school. They're always hyper focused. They don't struggle with distraction. For them, it maybe seems obvious that, well, you know, kids who are giving these tools are going to use them to learn even more. But I think that is just born out of a real disconnect from what real classrooms are like in modern UK, modern America, where just the ability to focus is a huge challenge for a lot of people. And if you have the temptation of this technology that can give you the answer straight away, that is incredibly hard to resist. So yeah, I think there is mounting evidence that having this available in classrooms is a problem, but even having it available outside of classrooms is a problem. And I suspect over the next few years we'll see schools, universities, colleges shift more and more to having rigorously assessed final exams, getting rid of more homework, getting rid of coursework, and just having something where the assessment is done away from AI and therefore all the rest of the year is building up to that assessment that it's going to be done with no AI. I would imagine that the argument from AI's defenders would be that if we're entering a world where AI is ubiquitous, where AI is used for pretty much everything, then not only should you have a fluency in AI tools, but trying to be good at tasks where you're not using AI isn't really a problem because you're never going to be trying to accomplish tasks without AI. In other words, these tests aren't really indicative of much because the future is completely different from the present reality we experienced today. What would be your view of that argument and do you think it has merits? Yeah, it's a really tricky one because I mean a lot of what you said from the people who say that is true. It is true that AI, I think at this point we can say AI is going to be heavily embedded into the world of work of the future. It's already heavily embedded in the work of the present in a lot of areas. I certainly use it a lot, for example, but the problem is school is where you learn. It's already true. You can take maths today, right? Calculators exist. People in the world of work use calculators, use spreadsheets, that kind of thing, but we still learn to calculate mentally, to make those calculations in our heads or on paper as we're going through the education system. It's only once you get to a certain point that the calculator comes in. So the risk with AI is that the learning never happens. We get straight to the AI. We don't learn the depth of knowledge that we might then need to navigate the world later on, but we don't even learn the act of how to learn. We don't learn how to spend an extended period of time with a piece of written work, trying to understand what it's saying. We don't learn how to write extensively ourselves and the act of writing is often where we actually come to understand what we think about something. So I think that's the risk and that's why it is different to things like a calculator. So I think you can imagine a world where the education system is done AI free as much as possible in terms of the actual learning experience, but there is then a sort of fast track later on in the education process where people are brought up to speed on the AI tools that they're going to encounter the world of work. John Byrne Murdock is colonist and chief data reporter for the financial times. John, this was fascinating. Thank you. Thank you. Two trillion dollars. That is how much money OECD nations now spend every year, not on roads or housing or cancer research, but on interest payments. The bills our governments must pay to simply sustain the amount of money that they continue to borrow. As for America specifically, our annual interest payment is now up to 1.25 trillion dollars. That is equivalent to roughly a fifth of the revenue our government brings in and it has roughly tripled since 2015. It's also more money than we spend on defense. In other words, one of the largest expenses on your tax bill is interest and on our current trajectory, it is only going to grow. How did we get here? Well, it's quite simple. Our leaders have decided that this is something they don't care about. President Trump, for example, campaigned on balancing the budget, but since he took over, he has exploded our annual deficit to roughly two trillion dollars. In other words, he is spending two trillion dollars more than he is bringing in. That is why our total national debt has now surpassed 40 trillion dollars and it's also why interest rates continue to rise. The more fiscally irresponsible we appear, the more money our lenders demand for holding our debt because it's simply too risky for them. That is why long-term treasury yields are so high right now. Investors simply don't believe that fiscal responsibility is something we take seriously at all. The upshot of higher yields is, of course, higher interest rates and higher interest rates, of course, means higher interest payments. Now, to be clear, we have dealt with high rates before in America. We have never dealt with them when our national debt was 40 trillion dollars and the combination of the two could prove to be quite deadly. According to the Congressional Budget Office, net interest costs in America will likely double over the next decade, which means that soon enough, we will be spending more money on interest than on literally anything else. America's debt problem is reaching a tipping point. It is worse than ever before. And if we continue to not take it seriously today, well, then I think the conclusion is quite obvious. We probably never will. Okay, that's it for today. This episode was produced by Claire Miller, Analysis and Weiss, and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our video editor is Brad Williams. Our research team is Dan Chilan, Cristino Donahue, and Mia Salverio. And our social producer is Jake McPherson. Thank you for listening to Profty Markets from Profty Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow. I'm Ed Elson. I'll see you tomorrow. Support for the show comes from Harvey AI. The future of law is agentic, not just tools that assist, but AI agents that navigate complex matters. 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Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. The U.S.-Canada trade war has escalated with reciprocal tariffs, prompting Canada to match U.S. tariffs dollar-for-dollar, especially on steel, aluminum, and other goods, as a response to Trump's retaliatory actions.
  2. Economic impacts are significant for Canada, with potential GDP growth losses of 0.3–0.4% if tariffs continue for a year, while the broader trend reflects a shift toward trade diversification, including increased engagement with the EU.
  3. AI use in education is linked to declining student performance, with studies showing that daily AI users score significantly lower in reading and math, raising concerns about diminished critical thinking and long-term economic productivity.

Summary:

S. tariffs on steel, aluminum, and other goods by imposing equivalent tariffs, signaling a broader economic realignment. 4% of GDP growth—this standoff is accelerating a strategic shift toward trade diversification, including closer ties with the European Union.

Concurrently, global education data reveals a troubling decline in literacy, math, and science scores across countries over the past decade, with a significant drop in students' performance attributed to increased AI use and digital media consumption. Research indicates that daily AI users perform up to 28 points worse than non-users, raising concerns about weakening critical thinking and long-term economic productivity. Experts caution that while AI may dominate future work environments, its overuse in education undermines foundational skills like analysis and writing.

—threatens societal and economic resilience. 25 trillion annually—highlight a broader fiscal crisis, with long-term interest costs projected to double, threatening the stability of public finances. These interlinked issues suggest a global shift toward economic and educational reconfiguration, driven by technological disruption and policy misalignment.

FAQs

BCX is a public ticker for private tech companies, allowing everyday investors to access and invest in innovative companies like those leading the AI revolution, space exploration, and defense tech. It helps bridge the gap between private innovation and public investment, giving Americans more opportunities to participate in cutting-edge growth.

The U.S. has imposed tariffs on Canadian goods, including steel, aluminum, and dairy, prompting Canada to retaliate with matching tariffs. This trade war has impacted both economies, with Canada estimating a small hit to GDP growth, while also pushing it to diversify trade with the EU.

The OECD found that 15-year-olds who use AI daily score significantly lower in reading, math, and science than those who don’t. This suggests that over-reliance on AI may be undermining students’ ability to think critically and absorb information independently.

Global declines in education scores are linked to increased digital media use, pandemic-related disruptions, and over-reliance on AI tools, which may reduce students’ ability to focus, analyze, and retain information over time.

The U.S. shows a wide gap between top and bottom students in science and literacy, which could lead to a less skilled workforce. This inequality may result in a less productive economy, where only a small group of high-performing individuals drive growth and innovation.

AI tools can act as a crutch in learning, reducing students’ ability to develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills. When removed during final assessments, students who relied on AI during the year often perform poorly, highlighting risks in classroom use.

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