RealClearMarkets Articles

In his excellent new book Life After Capitalism (review coming soon), George Gilder routinely states an essential truth: knowledge is wealth. The inputs to everything we have and enjoy in modern times have always been with us, but we’ve only been able to transform them into staggering luxuries thanks to knowledge. As Gilder points out, when we buy gasoline for our cars we’re purchasing knowledge. Figure that the fuel has been around for billions of years, perpetually unused. It’s something to think about with the exciting news about advances in the battle against paralysis....

Before March 10, 2023, these kinds of moves had been exceptionally rare. In eurodollar futures and now SOFR futures (term), daily swings of greater than 20 bps were reserved for the most momentous occasions. Contract prices skyrocketed, for example, when news of Lehman Brothers hit. They doubled even that the Monday following SVB. Yesterday was different. Though contract prices shifted more than 20 bps, this time it was in the other direction. Starting around 7:30 am EDT, the crucial June 2024 was up to around 96.13. Over the next nineteen minutes, a massive wave of selling (hedging) took the...

Three years after the pandemic started, parts of the commercial property market are finally starting to buckle under the strain as it becomes clear that office work will never return to the post-Covid norm. The spike in interest rates and job cuts across most sectors including tech are adding to an already tough picture, contributing to rising loan delinquency rates and some big defaults that certainly won’t be the last. Offices are only half as full as they were before the pandemic. It’s not all doom and gloom, though. While things are looking bleak in the short term...

I first heard David Henderson speak at Cato University in 2003 at the Rancho Bernardo Inn. What he said about capitalism being compassionate stuck with me. And it still does. Henderson put it so well, and I’ve quoted him on it over the years. Henderson understandably wasn’t pleased with my critique of his tribute to Robert Lucas, and he wrote as much. More than fair enough. If I could take back what I wrote, it’s safe to say the substance of what I wrote wouldn’t much change, but the tone would. Up front, I’d like to apologize to Henderson for how I approached...

While growinng Wal-Mart into the world’s foremost retailer, Sam Walton was big on dropping into stores. He wanted his “associates” to see him, he wanted to learn from them too, plus he wanted to rally them. The "problem" was that Wal-Mart stores eventually numbered in the thousands. How to drop in in the way he always had? Technology proved helpful. As Walton biographer Vance Trimble explained it, the solution in 1985 was a $16 million purchase of a “Ku-band ‘hub station’ at headquarters consisting of a 9-meter antenna dish and ‘personal earth...

Your next-door neighbor just added a big deck in back, and the guy across the street has a new Tesla in the driveway. They are pulling ahead, and you are falling behind. Nobody likes being outclassed. Meanwhile, there are poor people across town who live on half of what you make, and their kids sometimes go hungry. That, too, bothers you. Caring about status is innate to human beings – and, most likely, to all sentient life – so we reflexively care about inequality. Likewise, caring about the misfortunes of other people is innate – so we especially loathe inequality when...

The debt-limit discussion would be far more reasonable if it were broadly understood that government has no resources. And by extension it has no credit. Please think about whom government attains its “credit” from while contemplating all the hysteria. Take the Cato Institute’s Romina Boccia. She contends that “What’s missing from the debate is serious consideration of the potentially catastrophic longer‐​term scenario the United States could face if spending and debt continue growing unabated.” But isn't the "unseen" of trillions and trillions worth of...

So, how is that future of work thing going? Well, if you ask the 1 in 2 American workers that go to work knowing they are a $400 parking ticket away from poverty, you’ll probably hear that the future of work isn’t really working for most workers. Today, millions of workers find themselves in a tough spot, where the pursuit of new knowledge and skills are hindered by financial constraints and lack of recognition. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, written well before any of our current technology could ever have been imagined, inadvertently denies access to learning...

Taxpayers today are being asked to invest billions of dollars to upgrade aging infrastructure and replace it with new, green technologies and energy sources. This investment would stimulate growth in our economy, provide fiscal stimulus, and create real growth in jobs, materials and manufacturing. Yet, a permitting logjam is stalling this growth: decades-old environmental and permitting rules needlessly add years and billions of dollars to the cost of those upgrades. Current bipartisan discussions in Washington about reforming these outdated permitting laws have become linked to the debt...

It has “upended its vast logistics network to reduce how far packages travel across the U.S. in an effort to get products to customers faster and improve profitability.” If you’ve read this far, you know the company referred to. If nothing else the title of this opinion piece gave it away. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Amazon continues to search for ways to serve its customers better, and more profitably. Of course, some or many who should know better might be wondering why Amazon would have “upended” a logistics network that has earned the...

Congress is currently examining the expansion of the Small Business Administration’s lending programs. Expansion makes sense for a variety of reasons, but there should be no expansion until the historic fraud and abuse witnessed in the Paycheck Protection Program is investigated and resolved. By connecting them with lenders, capital, and counsel, the SBA serves a vital role for the health of America’s small business community. Congress's role is to provide constant oversight and ensure that SBA remains accountable and responsive to the taxpayers who fund its mission. In recent...

The IRS recently announced that it will launch a free-to-use e-filing pilot program next year. But taxpayers should look past the appealing word “free” in that phrase and be more skeptical about what such a program would really cost them.  Every tax filing season, Americans spending time and money filing their taxes ask why it is even their responsibility. It’s an understandable question, after all: should taxpayers really be required to help the IRS with the process of rifling through their pockets? But taxpayers are left with this responsibility for a simple reason:...

“Things gained through unjust fraud are never secure,” wrote the famed Athenian playwright Sophocles. This timeless observation has been much in evidence of late in Silicon Valley. The pervasive “fake it until you make it” culture has come crashing down on one-time luminaries such as Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos to Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX. (It turns out the world outside of “the Valley” occasionally cares about investor fraud and financial mismanagement.) Keystone financial institutions, including Silicon Valley Bank, have recently come crashing down,...

You don’t really need me to tell you this, but the usual-suspect, woke-capital CEOs and activist groups are lying when they claim that their wholly political campaign to kill off reliable energy is somehow capitalism in action. For replete and redundant proof, look around you for modern-day evidence of the once-thriving horse-and-buggy industry. I’ve long said that you can tell what the left is up to by what it accuses its opponents of, and that the more the accusations are trumpeted by left-allied organizations, the greater the attempted deception. The Durham...

If you’re reading this write-up, odds are you’ve seen the horrifying photos of adults with water up to their necks trying to transport crying babies across rivers to safety. Whether you’re for a wall or fully open southern borders, these scenes likely horrify you? The bet here is they’ll be the norm until it’s acknowledged that scenes at the southern border are a reflection of market signals suffocated. The foremost market signal is that the U.S. is prosperous. Extraordinarily so. And enormous prosperity will always exist as a magnet for those seeking a better...

In 1980, the US economy was in terrible shape. Inflation was soaring, growth was stalled, federal spending was rapidly rising, and taxes were at record highs. The Republican Party responded with a platform stating that “nothing is more important than economic growth.” GOP presidential candidate Ronald Reagan made this the centerpiece of his campaign for the White House, running on a plan to restore economic growth. The message resonated, propelling Reagan to a landslide victory in which he won 44 states and helped Republicans win control of the U.S. Senate for the first time in 28...

The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable.” – Fredric Bastiat How things change. Back when then-President Obama was going to such enormous lengths to push through the misnamed “Affordable Care Act,” members of the Right had a rather common sense response: why, if the healthcare legislation is so good, do you have to force it upon us? Why indeed. In the real world of commerce businesses succeed because they meet a market need, or better yet, they lead it. Unable to force their products on customers, they prosper precisely because...

The Supreme Court has placed the notorious Chevron deference doctrine on a death watch. It's demise, if it comes to pass, bodes ill for further unchecked expansion of the administrative state. Under the Chevron doctrine, if courts determine that a statute administered by a federal agency is ambiguous, they must defer to any agency interpretation of the statute that is reasonable. Indeed, as the Court put it in Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984) nearly four decades ago, courts are to accord not just mere deference, but "controlling...

When it comes to innovation, particularly in the tech sector, there is a strong mandate to innovate or become irrelevant. And when it comes to establishing the rules, you’re either at the table or on the menu. China has already indicated that its vision for the future of artificial intelligence is very much about controlling the dissemination of information in profound ways. A recent proposal from the Cyberspace Administration of China says that AI content must reflect the country’s “core socialist values” while doing nothing to subvert the power of the...