RealClearMarkets Articles

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...

Despite the negative spin from the news media, the latest government economic report showed positive signs of strength in the U.S. economy, with strong evidence that the tax cuts enacted last year are working to increase consumer spending, business investment, and economic growth.The recently released advance GDP estimate for the second quarter showed real GDP growing at a 1.5% annual rate, compared to 2.1% for the first quarter.  The New York Times reported the “economy is slowing,” and CNN said the “economy is losing steam.”  But that is not the case at...

Washington is debating nearly every aspect of economic policy, from taxes and tariffs to interest rates and the future of the Federal Reserve. Yet one of the greatest threats to long-term financial stability is barely part of the conversation: the continued expansion of credit far beyond the growth of the nation's underlying productive wealth. Markets may continue climbing, but history suggests periods of financial optimism often mask growing structural vulnerabilities. Throughout America's 250-year history, cycles of speculation have repeatedly given way to financial crises. The creation...

Rather than inevitable, as Marx claimed, what defines socialism are its inescapable aspects.  The hallmarks of socialism are its inescapable economic failure and social oppression. These are not coincidental but simultaneous and reinforcing. Marx claimed that socialism was the inevitable final development of capitalism.  For Marx, socialism and communism would occur as the culmination of economic development; eventually, too, the need for the state (viewed by Marx as the means by which the bourgeoisie held the proletariat in check) would wither away.  Of course, neither of has...

In March 2024, the American Enterprise Institute published an article titled “Canada’s Jew-Hatred Problem,” advocating that Washington consider asylum pathways for Canadian Jews. Although Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, the U.S. special envoy for combatting antisemitism, stated that Washington was not looking at resettling Canadian Jews, and that U.S. officials expected the Canadian government to step up security and better protect its Jewish citizens (subject to 71% of hate crimes though less than 1% of Canada’s population), Tulsa, Oklahoma is presently stepping in to do what...

Fancy cars don’t impress me. Neither do fancy lawyer offices, oriental rugs everywhere, and oil paintings of the founding partners (Mr. Fleecum, Mr. Cheatam and Mr. Steel). When I was younger, I did some real estate deals with Mr. Jones. Clarke Jones was in his seventies and rich as all get out. A homespun, modest and courtly gentleman with a raspy Bear Bryant voice, he wore a houndstooth hat and drove a twenty-year-old, beat-up Country Squire station wagon. My secretary loved him. “While you were out, Mr. Jones came by to see you,” she would say, practically melting....

The power “team picture” routinely changes in Washington. This historical truth doesn’t seem to be landing with Republicans in Congress, or their media allies.  Think the Wall Street Journal editorial board. Puzzlingly writing in glowing fashion about the Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act after having puzzlingly done so previously, the editorialists acknowledged last week a rather obvious problem with the legislation, specifically the “wisdom of ceding more tariff authority to the White House.” Well, yes. Does anyone remember the stock market reaction to...

Elon Musk--the world’s first trillionaire--has a dizzying array of businesses. For instance, Tesla is the most valuable car company in the world, and it also sells battery storage for homes, businesses, and utilities. Musk is also a majority owner of X (formerly known as Twitter) which is perhaps the most important social media platform on the globe. He controls xAI, which developed and operates the AI system that drives the Grok platform, and he runs Neuralink, which researches brain-computer interfaces. He also runs SpaceX, which is the clear leader in the market for space travel....

America will win the race to superintelligence unless we defeat ourselves. Unfortunately, there is a scenario where that happens — and as a policy matter, it’s already under consideration. The bans and restrictions on open-weight AI models floated by politicians and Anthropic alike are exactly that scenario. To give a brief primer, an open-source AI model is one whose code is made publicly available to anyone, anywhere in the world, so that they may adapt it as they wish. Motivations for doing so include fixing errors within the AI system or retooling it so that it can be...

U.S. retirees plan to work until they die. Which is a very happy story about the evolution of retirement. The previous truths are seemingly lost on policy writer John Mac Ghlionn. Writing recently at The Hill, Mac Ghlionn asserted with evident misery that “There are already a record 11.6 million Americans aged 65 and older still punching the clock.” He should be cheering what has him so downcast. While Americans used to work until 65 fully aware that they wouldn’t live much past “retirement age,” now they’re “still punching the clock.” Those who...

Last year’s bankruptcy of American auto parts maker First Brands Group (FBG) was a major news story in Cleveland, where the company was headquartered and where its loss dealt a heavy economic blow. Yet the story’s most significant implication was largely overlooked. The bankruptcy drew intense scrutiny in the Cleveland area when it triggered more than 1,200 layoffs in the region. Thousands more jobs were lost in the rest of the country. It is our dwindling manufacturing strength -- not just the legal drama surrounding the bankruptcy -- that should be the real headline,...

One day after July’s CPI report told the Fed hawks to stand down, today’s Producer Price Index delivered the same broad message from upstream in the economy.  Final demand producer prices were flat in July. Wall Street expected a 0.2 percent increase. On a year-over-year basis, headline PPI rose 4.7 percent, also below expectations.  That is another warning to the Eccles Building: do not invent an inflation crisis the data do not show.  Start with goods. Final demand goods prices fell 0.7 percent in July. Energy goods fell 3.1 percent. Food prices fell 0.9 percent....

Elon Musk has made one of the boldest economic predictions of the artificial-intelligence age: by 2036, money may no longer matter. The reasoning is clean. Money exists because things are scarce. If AI and robots produce more food, housing, transport and healthcare than human beings can consume, scarcity fades, and with it, the point of money. It is a compelling technological argument built on a single unexamined assumption: that money is fundamentally a rationing device for consumer goods. It was never only that. Money does not merely distribute goods. It distributes power. It records...

The DOJ was investigating Google and Chrome for monopolistic practices right as Open AI released ChatGPT in 2022. Get it? It’s worth thinking about as Holman Jenkins asks, “When is Beijing going to wake up?” Jenkins’s question is an AI question. He contends the “big concern should be open-weight AI models from China, distributed free or cheaply, which can be modified by the user beyond the purview or control of the creator.” A “Chernobyl moment” allegedly awaits from this due to lacking oversight from Beijing. But likely not. See above. Jenkins...

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy wants to put the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) back in the transportation business. His July 22 letter to Senate leaders calls for consolidating duplicative grants, cutting programs outside the department’s core mission, and demanding measurable results. Then it makes one conspicuous exception: Congress should attach the Railway Safety Act to any surface-transportation bill.Congress should leave it at the station.The Railway Safety Act fails the cost-benefit discipline that the administration says it wants to restore. It answers a...

When I chaired the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, I spent a lot of time listening to farmers. The concern I heard most often was the rising cost of the things they had to buy just to plant a crop: seed, fuel, equipment, and above all, fertilizer. More than a decade later, farmers are having the same conversation, except today the answers are not found in Washington or Little Rock, but in places like Beijing and the Strait of Hormuz. American farmers are in a genuine crisis. As their input costs rise, so too must the price of what they produce, and those costs eventually...

With a h/t to the late historian Barbara Tuchman, from whom I borrowed the central idea in this piece, I'm pleased to share my latest long-form note to Capital Allocation Pro subscribers published initially on 8/6/26.  "Long" in this context is measured by modern (overly hurried?) metrics, with the note's main body comprising ~1,600 words. I'm unsure if it'll win me new friends--it's quite critical of certain players on the world stage--but I stand by what I've written and hope readers find the note useful even if they disagree with some or all (!) of it. Feedback welcomed...

For months, the economic commentariat has been waiting for President Trump’s tariffs to ignite a new inflation fire. The script was already written: tariffs would raise consumer prices, the Federal Reserve would have to stay tighter for longer, and the American worker would once again pay the bill.  July’s inflation report just blew a hole through that story.  The Consumer Price Index rose only 0.1 percent in July. Core inflation, stripping out food and energy, rose just 0.2 percent. More important, core inflation over the last three months is running at only a 1.6...