Prof G Markets - Canadian Economist: Trump’s Tariffs Are A Gift To Mark Carney

Episode Date: September 9, 2026

Ed Elson is joined by Mike Moffatt to break down Canada’s retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. and what it means for the relationship between the two countries. Then, John Burn-Murdoch joins to unpack why the OECD’s global education report card was the worst on record and how it could impact the international economy. Finally, Ed gives his take on America’s debt problem.  Mike Moffatt is a Canadian economist and Founding Director at the Missing Middle Initiative. John Burn-Murdoch is a columnist and the chief data reporter for the Financial Times. Subscribe to the Prof G Markets Youtube Channel  Follow Prof G Markets on Instagram Follow Ed on Instagram, X and Substack Follow Scott on Instagram Send us your questions or comments by emailing [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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visit getvcx.com for more info. That's getvcx.com. Carefully consider the investment material before investing, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses, this and other information can be found in the fund's prospectus at getvcx.com. This is a paid sponsorship. If money is evil, then that building is held. Welcome to Profitey Markets. I'm Ed Elson. It is September 9th. Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals. The major indices declined on tensions in the Middle East. Brent crude rose above $99 per barrel. The yield on 10-year 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 levies 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 Moffat, 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 U.S. 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, you know, what the sort of tipping point was. You know, part of it is Canada not wanting to negotiate through the media, but it sounded like there were some last-minute changes that the Trump administration put on a deal between Canada and the U.S. 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, you know, 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, you know, not 100% of its imports from the U.S., where we have a little bit of choice to buy from, say, the U.S. 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 U.S.

economy and then also for the Canadian economy? Well, it's certainly a bigger hit for Canada. We're proportionally smaller. I've seen Trevor Toome at the University of Calgary's estimated that if these continue for a year, which shave about three to four tenths 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. And one of Canada's biggest exports is oil. And the price of Western Canadian Select has gone for about $50 a barrel prior to the actions in Iran to $80 a barrel. So 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 hope, Don. I hope the Canada and the U.S. can come to a deal. I think there is some hope in Canada that the upcoming midterms might get the U.S. to come forward with an agreement that we can live with. But in the meantime, we've got Prime Minister Carney 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 is 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 Carney with a hockey stick on the ice. What is your reaction to that video? It's gone pretty viral. A lot of people are very 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 the, 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,

of a rally around the flag, and Carney himself gets more popular. So if the administration is trying to force Canada to sign a deal, it's probably the worst possible thing to do because it just makes Carney more popular in the eyes of Canadians and gives Carney 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 Carney, because Because Canada is a smaller nation, it seems like he's trying to do this, make this bullying tactic or something. People just like Mark Carney 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 Carney and how much of that popularity is a function of Trump's attempts to bully him? I think quite a bit that right now the latest polling I saw from Nanos has the liberals, Mark Carney's party at 47%. The conservatives at 31%. And, you know, like the UK, we are a multi-party country. So a 16-point lead is massive. And I think a lot of that.

is, you know, all of the folks who aren't necessarily conservatives and many conservatives are parking their votes with the liberals right now. And if you look at polling about the response to these terror, the counter tariffs, you know, Canadians who are non-conservative voters support them in, you know, 90 to 95 percent. It's overwhelming. You can't get Canadians to agree on 90 to 95 percent 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? Like, is that, does that even exist? It does. I would say it's about 15% of the population. And it's about half of those conservative voters that I mentioned, that there is a cohort that, you know, likes Trump. They, you know, tend to be quite conservative. They tend to, you know, have been just sort of frustrated with Canada. They've always wanted Canada to be more like the United States when it comes to, you know, taxation and social issues and so on. So that does exist, but it's, you know, about an 85-15 split. I think most of us are quite upset with the Trump administration, and it has made us, unfortunately, more kind of 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 mentioned 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 US and Canada, and it seems as though the global order is kind of rerouting itself away from the US. Would you say that that is kind of the direction that we are headed as a as a, as a global economy? Yeah, I think so. And here in Canada, like, even if we had a deal tomorrow, there's just so much uncertainty. You know, 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, you know, 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. Well, we're actually doing it now. So there is some irony here. As much as, you know, we hate the, we hate the tariffs. We hate the, you know, hockey video memes. You know, 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?

I mean, 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 EU deal. So, you know, there's been this debate in Canada for decades about buying the F-35. You know, we might see see that go away. I do think the Canadian U.S. relationship is repairable, but it's going to, it's going to take a while. It will take, you know, kind of a few administrations of, you know, goodwill. But, you know, I do think our countries have too much in common, you know, to be forever at odds. But it certainly feels that way right now. Like, 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. What do you think 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, you know, right now he's seen as the leader who can get us through this war, but is somebody going to come around and, you know, become the Clement Attlee 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. is the kind of steady hand who's, you know, keeping us through this at a time of intense turmoil.

All right. Mike Marfett is Canadian economist and founding director at the Missing Middle Initiative. Mike, always appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you for having you. After the break, why kids around the world are getting stupider. You've got to try breakfast. And what better way than with a delicious pre-organic coffee? Starting with just $1 all day, every day, now until December 31st. You gotta try breakfast.

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This and other information can be found in the fund's prospectus at getvcx.com. This is a paid sponsorship. We're back with ProfiMarkets. The OECD released its global education report card yesterday. and the results were dismal. The organization's test measures 15-year-olds in reading math and science for more than 90 countries around the world. And 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, the lowest score America has ever posted. Math was flat at 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 Murdoch, columnist and the chief data reporter for the Financial Times. John, thank you for joining us on Profite 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, the 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 disruptive, 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, 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. really measured measurable worse outcomes for young people and children around the world. As you say, the fact that this is so broad-based 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 to this 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 assume a lot of it is 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 at potential role 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 years, 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 then 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, but some of it may have maintained. There were other disruptions. that have continued from that 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 OECD 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 analyze when doing math, reading, science exams. So all of these things do seem to be playing a role. So the reason I really wanted to have you on to talk about this, I mean, this is not an educational. podcast. This is a markets podcast. We cover finance. We cover economics. But to me, this really is an

economic story, because if young people are getting stupider, if their reading scores are going down, their math scores are going down, and their science 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 hard 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. It 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 at 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 affects the economy. It affects the functioning of political. systems, it affects how we interact with each other. 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, much better than the British, to that 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

everywhere in the world. Those are the people who start the companies that shake the economy. So to be clear, I'm not, 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 impact on the economy, I'm actually not entirely sure how this will pan out.

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 this 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 unevenly 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 for the economy. It has implications for 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 really 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 for a moment 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. Zeran Mamdani 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 Chinese high schools and universities that showed that students who were using AI to help with their assessments of their homework, it looked like they were doing really well on the homework and these examinations throughout 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, part of the learning process is extremely risky in terms of it essentially being used as a crutch that when taken away, people just collapse at the end. I think it's also just incredibly hard to enforce use of AII 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. And, We've seen this with all sorts of different forms of educational technology over the years as well.

It's a really, really fine, tight rope 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 borne 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 you. 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 experience 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 there from the people who say that is true. Like, 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. like it's all 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 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 we the learning never happens we go 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 source that they're then going to encounter in the world of work. John Byrne Murdoch is columnist and chief data reporter for the Financial Times. John, this was fascinating.

Thank you. Thank you. $2 trillion. 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. 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 $2 trillion.

In other words, he is spending. $2 trillion more than he is bringing in. That is why our total national debt has now surpassed $40 trillion, 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. Now, 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. 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 year. 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 and Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our video editor is Brad Williams. Our research team is Dan Jalan, Chris No Donahue and Mia Silverio, and our social producer is Jake McPherson. Thank you for listening to Prof G Markets from Proftry Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow. I'm Ed Elson. I'll see you tomorrow.