RealClearMarkets Articles

Under SEC Rule 506(d), a private fund cannot raise a dime from investors if its principals include a felon convicted of securities fraud or barred by a regulator within the lookback period. We call these people bad actors, and Washington built a disclosure regime to keep them out of your retirement account. Somehow the nonprofit sector, which asks for your money on the strength of a tax-exempt label, never got the memo. That may be changing. CBS News reported this week that the Trump administration is weighing a rule requiring nonprofits to disclose on their Form 990, the...

Who knew Kylie Jenner had such a mind for business? The question asked is not meant as an insult. Quite the opposite. Jenner is a reminder of why “these kids today” eventually evolve into prosperous adults. Having interacted with technology in ways their elders never did, they see it differently. Applied to Jenner, adults saw the social media on which she interacted to the tune of millions of followers as – yes – the stuff of “these kids today.” To Jenner, those millions of followers were her marketing strategy. As Forbes eventually reported alongside the...

Much to the dismay of U.S. businesses, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the European Union's landmark digital platform-regulation framework, has not stayed confined to Europe. Voluminous DMA regulations stemming from the European Commission already impose substantial costs and impact the day-to-day EU operations of Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft, threatening the companies with potential fines of 10 percent of annual global revenue. If enforced, any such fine would send shocks through the U.S. stock market and potentially the broader economy. From Latin America to East Asia,...

 The Net Zero movement in business and finance is in full retreat if not outright capitulation.  The Net Zero Banking coalition, for example, has ceased being a membership-based group after a mass exodus of members.  The prospect of a cartel imposing deindustrialization to fight climate change is seemingly vanishing.  Except perhaps not.  I do not believe that proponents of climate catastrophism have experienced a conversion.  The public dialogue has changed dramatically, in line with the backlash against ESG and DEI, and President Trump has called...

The Trump administration has improved upon the famous adage that capitalists will sell communists the rope by which the latter would hang the former. Now the capitalists seem to be just giving the rope away. The supposedly free-market-oriented commissioners at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission just announced an extension of last year’s policy giving corporate managements a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card on shareholder proposals. That policy effectively locks in anti-business gains made over the past couple of decades by left-wing activist shareholders. For decades,...

“Travel advisers play a more critical role at the top end of the market.” Those are the words of Cornell professor of services management Christopher K. Anderson to the Wall Street Journal. That more people require travel advisers than ever, and in more gilded fashion than ever, is a statement of the obvious. Before the internet, travel agents were reduced to spending enormous amounts of time on the phone with airlines booking tickets. Yes, how very primitive. Would it that American realtors would not just grasp the previous truth, but also view it as the best reason to demand...

Vice President JD Vance appeared on Michael Knowles’s Daily Wire podcast to discuss his new book, Communion. The two also discussed the Veep’s views on economic policy. Vance said that President Trump has reshaped the Republican Party and the conservative movement by replacing the old free-market consensus with one favoring government interventions in the economy, such as tariffs, to benefit working families. The Vice President failed to mention the role tariffs play in the affordability crisis that continues to bedevil the very middle- and working-class Americans the...

Politicians, ballot initiatives, and interest groups advocating for higher taxes are heading into the fall with cause for concern. That’s because recent weeks and months have provided numerous instances of voters rejecting proposed tax increases, including in some of the country’s most left-leaning jurisdictions.  Take California’s June primary elections, particularly how San Francisco voters responded to Measure D, a ballot measure seeking to raise the local gross receipts tax that targets companies based on CEO pay. Measure D would’ve raised San...

If you want to clear a room at a cocktail party don’t talk about monetary policy, talk the national debt. That’s because everyone in the room has almost certainly heard and read what you’re saying multiple times in the days, weeks and months preceding your ministering. To write about the oncoming debt disaster is like writing about who occupies the White House: everyone knows. Which means it’s priced. Despite that, policy types continue to beat stables of horses to death. Even though the markets for Treasury debt are by far the most knowledgeable markets in the world,...

I grew up on a farm in Iowa, surrounded by cooperatives long before I understood what they were.  We bought seed and fertilizer from co-ops. We sold our crops through them, and relied on a rural electric cooperative to power our home.  Like millions of Americans, I was part of the cooperative economy without realizing it. Today, as president and CEO of the National Cooperative Business Association (NCBA), I see that same model not as a relic of rural America, but as one of the most underutilized tools we have to build a more resilient economy. Cooperatives are simple in concept but...

Earlier this month, the U.S. Senate took its summer vacation before finishing work on the Clarity Act, cutting the chances that the major crypto finance legislation will pass Congress and become law by Election Day in November. This delay is not a disaster for the crypto finance industry — yet. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has promised to bring the bill to the Senate floor in September, making it one of the few remaining issues to be debated before the midterms. Yet a prize remaining just inches out of reach is cause for heartburn, even as serious supporters like Wyoming Senator...

Established by President Trump on the first day of his second term to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies,” the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) ended its operations on July 4. President Trump envisioned DOGE’s eventual accomplishments as “the perfect gift to America on the 250th Anniversary of The Declaration of Independence,” and DOGE itself asserts $215 billion in savings. However, an August report released by...

The Trump administration has consistently implemented (and recently lowered) Section 232 tariffs on industries critical to America’s economic and national security, including aluminum and steel. But as it considers similar action on semiconductors, we face a fundamentally different challenge.  Semiconductors are not like other inputs; they can be found inside nearly everything Americans buy. They are a vital component of modern life, and a secure semiconductor supply chain is essential to protecting everyday consumers and the economy writ large. The impacts of broad semiconductor...

When Henry Ford’s Model T revolutionized the car market, affording everyday Americans the opportunity to buy a car, automakers realized they needed local businessmen to sell their product. The car dealership was born. Protected by numerous state laws to manage the initial rocky relationship between dealers and manufacturers, the franchise model has remained the standard for decades. Lawmakers talk a lot about affordability these days but seem to overlook regulations impacting one of the largest expenses consumers face: buying a car. While necessary in the 20th century, automobile...

In June, Apple did the thing it almost never does. It raised prices across the lineup at once. The base 13-inch MacBook Air went up two hundred dollars to $1,299. The entry 14-inch MacBook Pro climbed three hundred. The 11-inch iPad Air rose a full 25 percent, and the cheapest iPad went higher than that. On his final earnings call July 30, Tim Cook called it a "100-year flood" in memory pricing and said Apple had raised prices reluctantly. That part is true, and unusually candid for a company that treats margin as scripture. The flood is real. What is not being said is where the water is...

Bernie Sanders spent this week doing something he has done before, only with sharper teeth. In a letter first published by Axios, he wrote to OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, quoting their own past warnings back at them, then told them to stop. “Pause AI development,” he wrote. “It is not too late to avoid disaster.” He also wants Congress to consider a 50 percent government stake in AI companies and a one-time 50 percent tax on their stock, building on the AI Data Center Moratorium Act he introduced with Rep....

The profit motive produces its own “gravediggers.” That’s what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels argued in The Communist Manifesto. Marx’s very own writing explains why the future he and his patron envisioned will never come to be. At least not in the way that the duo imagined. Quoting George Will’s recent quotation of Marx in a piece about Democratic Socialists, “Under capitalism, he wrote, man ‘is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood.’ But in communist...

I knew the private equity party was over when I started hearing about PE firms "rolling up" the car wash industry. I live in a small town of 40,000 people, and we now have a car wash on, seemingly, every single corner. Every last one of them wants me to sign up for a monthly subscription. A monthly subscription for a car wash? Are you kidding me? If I am anywhere close to representative of the average American, we are about one more subscription from an armed insurrection.  American consumers are at their wit’s end. If you doubt that, take a look at the University of Michigan...

Socialists are winning Democratic primaries. But are they winning over Americans? On paper, many love socialist economic policies but hate the word "socialism." At the same time, they're losing faith in "capitalism," but they still love the "free market." If your head is spinning, you’re not alone. The political debate over economics has become as much about language as policy. Yes, socialism is gaining ground. Younger voters support it, and it’s gained more footing with Democrats. Voters under 35 prefer socialism to capitalism by 18 points, according to CNBC’s All-America...