Riots in France over prices and schools come as debt hits record high. The United States has the same problems,

America is experiencing worse inflation, as Fortune» reported Jason Ma on Monday. Consumer prices in the United States rose 3.7% in the year through September, compared with 3.4% in France according to the measure harmonized with the EU. What makes up for it is growth. US GDP grew 2.2% in second quarter; unemployment is 4.2%; and wages are growing about 3.0% per year, which is lower than inflation. Meanwhile, France expects economic growth of just 0.5% this year, and youth unemployment there is around 20%.

Growth aside, the two countries have a lot in common. And Americans aren’t thrilled about where this growth is coming from. Technology investments account for about a third of U.S. GDP growth, according to ING. Yet 39% of Americans now say AI does more harm than good, up from 31% a year ago, and 79% expect AI to eliminate U.S. jobs over the next decade, according to a Bentley-Gallup survey conducted in May. Among adults under 30, the figure for harm is 47%. A Pew survey in June found that 52% of Americans were more concerned than excited about AI.

The same trap

Start with debt. French public debt is at a record high of 119% of GDP, while publicly held US debt reached 100.2% of GDP at the end of March. Lecornu’s budget, which would reduce France’s deficit from 5.4% to 5% of GDP, faces its first critical vote in the National Assembly on Tuesday. Washington ran a deficit of $1.992 trillion in fiscal year 2026, or about 6.2% of GDP according to CBO projections. Needless to say, this is bigger than the 5.4% deficit France is rioting against.

Bond traders treat both countries the same. Bank of America economists Claudio Irigoyen and Antonio Gabriel recently found that French and U.S. 10-year yields were moving on almost the same trajectory, and they say the cause is the same. “When interest rates are low, governments have incentives to run larger deficits, financed by cheap debt,” they write in a BofA Global Research report. “However, if this ‘cheap’ debt is used to finance a structural increase in the budget deficit, when interest rates rise it is politically difficult to implement the fiscal consolidation needed to put the house in order.”

Riots are what a “politically difficult” situation looks like. In the United States, the warning came from the bond market. On September 8, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told an audience at Southern Methodist University, “I’m home now.” The bond market disagreed. Over the next three weeks, the 30-year Treasury yield climbed to 5.69%, levels not seen since 2002, Johns Hopkins economist Steve Hanke and former comptroller general David Walker wrote in Fortune.

Where the anger began

The protests in France began in classrooms. In mid-September, high school students in the Paris suburbs demonstrated because of missing teachers, overcrowded classrooms and buildings that were unbearable in the heat. They blamed years of underinvestment. Teachers and unions joined in, then the population became outraged at the price of fuel and the cost of living.

American schools exhibit the same pressure, and by some measures the situation is worse. Lost lesson time: in France, 9.8% of teaching hours in public middle and high schools were not taught in 2024-2025, mainly because absent teachers were not replaced, according to the statistics office of the Ministry of Education. In the United States, the GAO found that 19 percent of school districts canceled classes that year due to construction issues, costing about 2 million students about 3.5 million learning days.

Nearly half of districts had chronic facilities problems that disrupted learning. Staff: At the start of the school year, 53% of French middle and high schools were missing at least one teacher, according to a survey of 1,033 establishments by SNES-FSU, the largest secondary school teachers’ union in France. At the start of 2024-2025, 74% of U.S. public schools struggled to fill at least one vacancy with a fully certified teacher, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Diplomas: 11.1% of French secondary school teachers are not fully qualified, according to the OECD. In the United States, the Learning Policy Institute estimates that 387,843 teachers are not fully certified for their assignments and calls this figure an underestimate.

President Trump sees another cause. “What’s happening in France is nothing short of uncontrolled mass migration,” he said on Truth Social on October 6, adding that “it’s not about schools, it’s about Islam wanting to take over a once great country,” without addressing his own country’s fiscal similarities. The students’ demands do not mention immigration or religion. Paul Donovan, chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, called the weekend’s violence “a different form of economic scapegoating” in a note to clients Monday.

The cushion lasts as long as growth. Market veteran Ed Yardeni claimed last month that the U.S. economy was “less rate-sensitive than it has ever been,” buoyed by wealthy retirees, large deficits and “an extraordinary boom in AI investment.”

Hanke and Walker end their column with a quote from MIT economist Rüdiger Dornbusch: “Crises take longer to happen than you can imagine, but when they do, they happen faster than you can imagine. »

Generative AI was used for research assistance and/or transcription of this article. The journalist independently reported and verified the factual claims in this article, and a human editor reviewed it before publication.