Daily Business Report: Monday, December 29
New CaliBaja Higher Education Consortium sets ambitious path for binational prosperity
By Mike Freeman | SDSU
Top higher education institutions in San Diego and Baja California, along with government and industry leaders, launched a new consortium on Dec. 12 aimed at strengthening the binational workforce and advancing cross-border collaboration and innovation.
The CaliBaja Higher Education Consortium (CHEC) seeks to institutionalize transborder academic collaboration in one of the most interconnected border zones in the world, stretching from San Diego and Tijuana in the west to Calexico and Mexicali in the east.
The region is home to 7 million people and roughly $70 billion in goods and services flow across the border each year. Its $250 billion in annual economic output would put it near the world’s top 10 largest economies. The goal of CHEC is to build on an already strong foundation of education and research for a more competitive and prosperous region.
Why do pessimistic pundits keep getting Trump’s economy so wrong?
By Stephen Moore | NY Post
Even more surprising than the blockbuster 4.3% economic growth rate recorded in the third quarter of 2025 was the fact that some 90% of the nation’s professional economists got it all wrong.
These economic whiz-kids’ faulty forecast comes on the heels of their predictions last week that inflation was going to be above 3%. Instead, the actual number was 2.7%.
Welcome to the gang that can’t shoot straight.
By Kim Strassel | WSJ
As 2025 comes to a close, consider this remarkable fact: Not a day passed this year in which Donald Trump didn’t dominate headlines. Joe Biden would disappear for weeks at a time. Trump? There’s no hiding from him. His White House was a perpetual-motion machine, reaching into every corner of Washington and beyond. Some actions were consequential; others amounted to little more than pokes in woke America’s eye. But they were all loud, and nonstop. This was a president rejecting lame-duck status, demonstrating he intends to wring the life out of every day remaining to him in the Oval Office.
The volume was so huge—and so wide-reaching—that it’s hard to step back and evaluate the bigger goals. Yet here’s an attempt at just that—a packaging of the bigger themes of this first year, and an evaluation of the highs, the lows and the yet-to-be-determined. Happy year-end reading:
