RealClearMarkets Articles

In his successful effort to convince President Trump to appoint him Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Andrew Ferguson made contradictory promises. On one hand, he promised to “end [former FTC Chair] Lina Khan’s war on business” while also promising to use his power as FTC Chair to go after “big tech” and “woke corporations.” Saying he would end Lina Khan’s war on business suggested he might restore the consumer welfare standard that dominated antitrust policy from the Reagan years until Joe Biden installed Lina Khan as...

The RealClearMarkets/TIPP Economic Optimism Index, a key gauge of consumer sentiment, fell from 52.0 in February to 49.8 in March, a 4.2% drop. After hitting a 40-month high of 54.0 in December, it edged down to 51.9 in January and 52.0 in February. Since President Trump’s re-election in November 2024, the index had stayed in optimistic territory but slipped below the 50.0 threshold in March. March’s reading of 49.8 is 1.3% higher than its historical average of 49.2. Investor confidence improved by 4.2% (2.4 points) to 60.2, while non-investor confidence dropped sharply by 4.3...

A federal tax levied on a New York City resident is a tax on a Floridian. The previous truth is rarely discussed by economists and pundits focused on Floridians who’ve escaped blue state taxes, but it’s true nonetheless. To see why, stop and contemplate the national implications of taxes paid by private equity multi-billionaires like Blackstone co-founder Stephen Schwarzman. Members of Congress don’t just stare lovingly at money Schwarzman pays in federal taxes, rather the copious sums Schwarzman hands over to the U.S. Treasury each year empower Congress to allocate ever...

What is DOGE really doing—and why is it so controversial?  The answer lies in an esoteric if straightforward concept that began in the world of  budgeting:  Zero-basing. As a general rule, most organizations, businesses, agencies, and even households building budgets start by asking themselves a simple question: What did we spend last year?  To answer, they compile a list of expense categories and the amounts spent in each one.  Next, they look ahead to the coming year to see which categories will require a bump up and where they can cut.  Finally, they...

Before the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), it had been 30 years since any major tax cuts and revisions took place in the U.S. tax code. While most other countries had slashed their rates in those three decades, America was known for having the highest corporate tax rate among industrialized nations. We were losing our competitive edge. Lowering the top statutory corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent through the TCJA constituted the largest corporate tax cut in U.S. history.  Now a second Trump administration is considering another cut. This time, it would drop from 21 to...

President Trump once stated: “‘tariffs’ is the most beautiful word in the English language.” I was a fervent supporter of the recent candidacy of my fellow New Yorker (he hails from Queens, I’m from next door Brooklyn), but I beg to differ with him on this issue. It is not even close. There are many candidates which beat out tariffs in the beautiful word sweepstakes: love, beauty, justice, truth, charity, civilization, prosperity; anyone can add to this list. I would also add specialization and the division of labor, for that is one of the very well-springs of...

“He was just the waiter.” That’s what one of the owners of legendary New York steakhouse Peter Luger said about Wolfgang Zwiener. “All” he’d done over the decades was wait tables at Luger’s, and this ordinary former employee was in the process of opening his own, eponymous steakhouse to compete not just with Luger’s, but in the most restaurant competitive city on earth. What the owner perhaps missed is that people who love themselves enough to get to the United States are rarely ordinary, and Zwiener took his ambition from Germany (his father...

The thing about the Left and their feminine minded screamers is they are not very smart. They hear a few harsh words, despite being 100% true, and then run outside with their pinkies in the air. Here's a lesson for you. Just because you are emotionally unbalanced, doesn't mean those of us who practice logic are bound by your faulty wiring systems. Your squeamish emotions are just that, yours. They have nothing to do with reality. I'm proud of our president and JD Vance for dressing Zelensky down. Another issue with the simple minded is every issue has to be a binary choice, Zelensky good,...

Whatever worries you about what’s going on in the world, stop. The advice is wise not because your fears aren’t potentially valid, but precisely because they’re potentially valid. If they are, rest easy that what keeps you up at night has already been priced. Take the present budget debate between the left and right. About the debate, it should be said ahead of time that government spending is the cruelest tax of all. When governments spend, they’re substituting knowledge-deficient politicians for the marketplace in the allocation of trillions worth of privately...

I visited Vietnam in 2014, in September 2022 and again in December 2024. It is immediately obvious how the country is growing from year to year and, during my conversations with entrepreneurs, I witnessed their incredibly strong entrepreneurial spirit first-hand. There is probably no other country in the world where the pursuit of wealth is as important as it is in Vietnam. I commissioned the opinion research institute Ipsos MORI to conduct a survey in 13 countries to find out more about popular attitudes toward wealth. One of the questions was: “How important, if at all, is it for you...

Seth Lipsky at The New York Sun wants Trump to tackle inflation—fair enough. But his call to “rally public opinion” before pegging the dollar to gold is a mess. Lipsky’s sweating a persuasion tour like it’s a must for a hard money revolution. Why the panic? When America moves, the world follows—no pep rally needed. Nixon didn’t beg to ditch Bretton Woods in ‘71. No chats, no polls—just a Camp David huddle, a gold peg axed, and a “New Economic Policy” dropped on live TV. The public accepted it, though it led to worse...

Donald J. Trump is many things. Dull is not one of them. Since returning to the White House, he has spent considerable time and effort reshaping the executive branch through the creative use of the president’s power to issue executive orders.  Trump has closed—or is close to shuttering—executive branch agencies, is attempting to pare down the federal workforce, and is bringing federal agencies considered to be independent of the executive branch under presidential control.  It’s an interesting experiment in governance that shows he’s not afraid to throw...

For an agency meant to protect Americans from financial harm, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) sure has caused a lot of it. Its onerous regulations have stifled the American public and its economic liberty for the last fifteen years. Since its installation in 2010, the CFPB has dramatically increased mortgage costs, limited community banking, and restricted access to credit cards, among other lousy policies.  Now, the CFPB wants to reach even further into the wallets of everyday Americans by policing popular payment platforms. In December, the...

It always interested Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane that while left-handed writers represent roughly 11 percent of the population, something like 40 percent of Cato’s staff wrote left-handed. Crane’s conclusion from the statistical oddity was that the left-handed aren’t mirror images of majority. They see the world differently, and seemingly in a libertarian fashion. More on Cato, when John Stossel would present to the Institute’s donors and explain his libertarianism, he would always say that he viewed homosexuality as something every bit as natural as...

“Carried interest” is extraordinarily misleading. It implies a fixed and very certain income stream in the way that interest bearing accounts at banks do. Which is the problem. Carried interest is the opposite of certain, and it’s not even income.  It’s a share of the “profits” on an investment that is paid to the investor who committed the capital in rather intrepid fashion. Which explains the placement of profits in quotes.  They aren’t gains borne of putting money to work in a blue-chip corporation, or an index fund. As evidenced by the...

The impact of Trump’s re-election in November continues to reverberate around the world. The World Economic Forum’s annual gathering of elites in Davos has become a shell of what it once was. Global financial alliances, once boasting tens of trillions of assets under management by member companies, have become defunct. Corporate America, including lefty Silicon Valley tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Meta, are running for the exits when it comes to DEI. But underlying these changes has been relentless political pressure from Red...

Less than a week before the end of her tenure as chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan and the Attorneys General of Illinois and Minnesota filed a federal lawsuit against John Deere, arguing that Deere “has throttled the ability of farmers and independent repair providers (‘IRPs’) to repair Deere equipment, leaving farmers wholly reliant upon Deere’s network of authorized dealers (‘Deere dealers’) for many key repairs.” Khan fancies herself an economist and expert on industrial organization by virtue of a law degree and...

Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan did not act like someone who was leaving a position. In November, Chair Khan launched an investigation into Microsoft. Then in December the FTC sued  Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits, the nation’s largest distributor of wine and spirits, for allegedly violating the Robinson-Patman Act. This is the first case brought under the New Deal era law since 2000. Robinson-Patman forbids distributors, such as Southern Glazer’s, from selling their products to large retailers like Total Wine at a lower price than that offered to...

In his inauguration speech, President Trump vowed to “overhaul” America’s trading system “to protect American workers and families,” specifically through tariffs. He hasn’t hesitated to take action, imposing 10% tariffs against China and announcing 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum.  These aggressive measures are reattempting the harmful and unsuccessful protectionist policies of Trump’s first presidential term. They will only obstruct his promise to build “the golden age of America” by raising prices,...