RealClearMarkets Articles

“Without broader hiring reforms, proto right-wing employees will continue to control big business. Several states are trying to dictate what conservative executives should and shouldn’t instruct employees about, but these efforts similarly don’t reach the core of big business’s sickness – the commercial monopoly of right-wing thought that guarantees its continued malignancy.” It’s bothersome, isn’t it? Members of the left trying to force their viewpoints into private businesses. Except that a left winger didn’t write the above. No doubt...

Established in 1984, the St. Kitts & Nevis Citizenship by Investment Program is one of the oldest and most trusted in the world. Investors can qualify through either a real estate purchase or a donation to the Sustainable Growth Fund (SGF). No one has appreciated the CBI program more than 36-year-old James Charles Taylor, who has become an avid spokesperson for the program. When Taylor first applied for citizenship of St. Kitts & Nevis, which requires purchasing a property with a value of at least £300,000, the attraction was conventional: a passport that unlocks hassle-free...

Now that Congress has passed, and President Trump has signed into law, the One Big Beautiful Bill, here's a less momentous, but nevertheless important task for Congress to undertake. The outdated Communications Act of 1934, most recently amended by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, should be substantially revised to "Make Communications Law Relevant Again."   Even though the Supreme Court recently rejected a challenge to the constitutionality of the Federal Communications Commission's program involving $9 billion in annual subsidies to provide "universal service," there is...

The hysterical reactions to the Republican tax bill is strikingly similar to the overwrought reactions to the  Reagan tax cuts in the early 1980s.  Now, like then, Congressional Democrats and the media are suddenly worried about deficits, and their impact of interest rates, inflation, and the economy.The New York Times recently wrote that higher deficits from the Republican tax cuts “will put upward pressure on interest rates, weakening the economy.”  The Washington Post has the same concerns, writing that the increased deficits will “leave interest rates...

Texas should institute a state income tax. So should Florida and Tennessee, along with all U.S. states that presently don’t have an income tax. Please read on.  This is decidedly NOT a call for more taxes. Taxes are a price, or a penalty placed on work. As opposed to encouraging more taxation, this opinion piece is instead calling for what red staters should cheer: bringing taxation and government back to the local level, and away from the federal government.  Which means this is a SALT piece, though one written from the perspective of red states, along with incredulity about...

Imagine life in a place in which you must show your papers to carry out many essential and ordinary tasks in your day — to start the car, or to pump gas, or to buy groceries. Don’t fret, the authorities say, this is simply a public-safety measure; after all, citizens are free to do what they like — so long as they provide the proper documentation. Such an oppressive regime seems intolerable, impracticable, and out of the question. Americans have a healthy fear of jackboots and Big Brotherism, and the state lacks the sheer manpower to station officers outside of every...

The Cryptocurrency Cryptocurrencies emerged in 2009 with Bitcoin, as an alternative to traditional finance. These digital assets are not issued by any central bank or government and are not legal tender. Instead, they are generated through cryptographic algorithms on distributed networks known as blockchains. Their value is highly volatile and entirely market driven. Cryptocurrencies are largely speculative assets, vulnerable to fraud, manipulation and hacking, with limited adoption as a true means of payment. Despite early promises of decentralization and transparency, the crypto ecosystem...

The Department of Justice’s recent antitrust review of Alphabet’s proposed $32 billion acquisition of the cybersecurity firm Wiz is just the latest in a long series of regulatory overreach that threatens to inadvertently create monopolies rather than prevent one. If this deal ends up being blocked, it would almost certainly cement the dominance of Amazon and Microsoft in cloud computing while leaving smaller companies more vulnerable to ever-growing cyber threats. Here’s the reality the DOJ seems to be missing: Google isn’t the tech titan they’re worried about,...

Reforming Medicare resembles the old cliché about the weather: everyone (at least in DC) talks about it—but no one does anything about it. The reason everyone talks about it is because Medicare is one of the largest items in the federal budget. The reason no one does anything about it is because Medicare’s beneficiaries are senior citizens. Seniors have higher voting rates than any other age group. Politicians who suggest any changes to Medicare will be smeared by their political opponents as wanting to deprive seniors of health care. This attack will come...

What keeps the CEOs of financial institutions awake at night? One or two errant employees out of tens of thousands can bring down the franchise.  What robs financial institution heads of sleep explains the superfluity of governmental punishment for errors inside financial institutions. Think what happened to Wells Fargo in 2018. What the federal government did to the financial services giant was disturbing then, and it still is now. Stop and think how crippling it would be for the federal government to discipline a business by strictly limiting its ability to grow. But we’re...

“This is clearly a shift in budget accounting that will clear the path to ballooning the debt now, but will also create a precedent that will be used over and over and over again in the future.” Those are the words of Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. MacGuineas is a debt and deficit scold in good standing with deficit and debt scolds. Her quote comes from a Washington Post analysis of the Republican tax bill. MacGuineas was critiquing what the Post describes as “an unusual accounting maneuver" used by the GOP to pass its tax bill....

Corporate activism traditionally meant businesses lobbying for policies favorable to their economic interests—such as lower corporate taxes, favorable regulations, or profitable trade policies. Today, however, it increasingly signifies something more divisive and economically damaging. Recent controversies involving Disney, Anheuser-Busch, and Target illustrate a troubling trend: corporations pursuing political activism at the cost of billions in shareholder value. This phenomenon isn’t mere managerial opportunism. Rather, it represents a deeper, systemic shift we term Second Wave...

One of President Trump's campaign pledges was to allow Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to "go wild" as head of Health and Human Services. Some welcomed the idea, scarred by memories such as covid lockdowns and government mask mandates that lasted well beyond the arrival of the vaccines. Others, well aware of Kennedy's conspiracism and anti-vaccine views, dreaded the news. Agencies under Kennedy, like the FDA, are charged with maintaining standards of medical safety and effectiveness. Does "go wild" mean freeing Americans to make our own health decisions -- or ramming bad advice down our throats?As if...

Though it’s rare to hear someone praise the military-industrial-congressional complex, it is only the latter component that masks a praiseworthy feat.  Markets—also known as “people” voluntarily exchanging—have devised the most efficient methods for producing weapons in the United States, but Congress—or the government, in general—is what hampers the sale of these weapons.  The U.S. is the world’s largest arms exporter, but the international weapons market would benefit further if the U.S. regime had nothing to do with it. ...

You wake up to an alarm, flick on the light, brew coffee, and drive to work. Every step requires energy – the stuff that shares the coin of physical reality with matter, the E in E = MC2.  It keeps homes warm, food fresh and economies running.  Supplying 80% of the world’s primary energy, coal, oil and natural gas make up the lifeblood of modern civilization. Yet, there continue to be calls for the abandonment of these fuels without any feasible, scalable replacement in sight.  It is dishonest for “green” lobbyists to claim that electricity from wind...

Cognitive dissonance, or some may call it a lack of principles, has run strong throughout both iterations of the Trump administration, favoring political convenience, personal benefits, and populism over ideological consistency and lasting improvements to our system of governance. The new rift between Elon Musk and the Trump administration on the so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill” is indicative of the frustrations some are experiencing regarding the goals of the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the current goals of the...

It's so easily forgotten that people aren’t a cost. They’re an input, always and everywhere, and this truth won’t lose any validity as robots proliferate. Quite the opposite. Which is why it’s useful to respond to Manhattan Institute (MI) president Reihan Salam’s recent observation in the form of a question about immigration in an opinion piece he penned. Salam asked “If the classic case for openness to low-skill immigration is that newcomers do the jobs that Americans won’t do, what happens when robots can do them instead?” Salam could perhaps...

Senate bill would add at least $3.3 trillion to the national debt, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That was the headline in the New York Times as the Senate debated Donald Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill, an obese and odious tome at 1000 pages. The numbers associated with the deficit and debt have gotten so large that the headline, despite being multi-trillions of dollars, is just a small fraction of the debt we’ll incur over the next decade. The $3.3 trillion is the amount the bill increases the debt, above and beyond the $21 trillion that was already in the pipeline...

A show about a charismatic chef? Who would watch that? Those are two questions formerly asked by studio executives far more than most will ever realize. Evidence supporting the above claim can be found in how often often the highest of high-end chefs refer to themselves as "cooks." Let’s just say that the self-deprecation isn’t just a vehicle to get laughs. It’s much more notably a comment on how things used to be. In the past, chefs were not chefs. They were cooks, and they were cooks because people who served others from a kitchen were formerly thought to have relatively...