RealClearMarkets Articles

Have you ever accidentally put your hand on a hot stove? The reaction is immediate. You pull it away because the pain tells you something important. You have learned a lesson, and chances are you will never make the same mistake again. Most reasonable people learn from experience because repeating the same mistake only leads to the same painful result. That common sense principle should apply to economics just as much as it applies to everyday life. However, time after time, policymakers embrace economic ideas that have already failed, convinced that the outcome will somehow be different....

Much of college education is a complete scam. A joke. A terrible fraud and an immense money-laundering operation that guilts parents and taxpayers into distributing vast amounts of wealth to a bunch of entitled elitists. They have your number. You have been snookered because the "educrat" mafia has convinced you, as a parent and taxpayer, that your child will be a failure unless he or she goes to college, the type of college that only they administer and control. The frumpy professional classes who live off the largess of the state, but have never run a business or have any idea how to do so,...

AltaMed Health Services reported $1.72 billion in revenue in 2024, which is more than many publicly traded healthcare companies. Yet unlike a public corporation, the nonprofit entity answers to no shareholders, enjoys broad tax exemptions, and derives much of its revenue from taxpayer-supported healthcare programs. AltaMed also reported $1.66 billion in assets and its revenues exceeded expenses by $68.4 million. It operates more than 70 clinics, employs roughly 5,000 people, and serves more than 700,000 patients throughout Southern California, making it one of the nation’s largest...

If education is so important to the development and future prosperity of young people, why doesn’t the latter reflect in compensation for teachers? It’s a question worth asking as conservatives continue to promote an education crisis narrative. Better yet, if American education is so bad, why isn’t this reflected in the migration of financial, physical, and most of all, human capital, out of the U.S.? Consider an otherwise optimistic editorial at the Wall Street Journal about the U.S. on its 250th.  Amid the optimism, the members of the editorial board listed a few...

“Are you guys fucking serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.” This message was sent by Rob Flaherty, who at the time was Deputy Assistant to President Joe Biden, to an employee of Facebook after his “request” to remove a post criticizing the Administration’s COVID policies was ignored. Flaherty was not the only Biden official to pressure Facebook and other social media companies to remove posts challenging the official position on COVID and other matters. For example, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy suggested dealing with COVID-19...

On May 20, the attorneys general of Texas, Nebraska, Iowa and West Virginia sued Institutional Shareholder Services in four separate state courts, accusing the world's most influential proxy advisory firm of doing exactly what it promised clients it would not do: substitute an ESG agenda for financial judgment. Florida had already sued ISS and its rival Glass Lewis in November. The suits rely on state consumer-protection law, not ERISA. But they document the exact conduct federal law was written to prevent, and that's the argument worth making. Section 404(a)(1) of...

Citigroup announced a new platform for tokenized shares of private companies last week, describing it as a blockchain innovation. It may prove more significant as a challenge to one of finance's oldest assumptions. For more than a century, companies accepted transparency because they needed liquidity. If founders, employees and early investors sought a reliable way to convert ownership into cash, they accepted disclosure requirements, regulatory oversight and scrutiny that came with public ownership. Public markets were built on a simple reality:...

Data centers, and the $1 trillion+ that is being invested in their creation, are “causing” overall weakness in the U.S. economy. That’s according to former Biden White House economic official, Jennifer Harris. Writing in the New York Times, Harris asserts that “the artificial intelligence buildout is expected to rival or surpass previous technological booms at their peaks — rail, electrification and the internet revolution.” This is bullish, right? Not according to Harris. She laments that AI “is vacuuming up so much of our land, talent, semiconductor...

New Jersey's teachers' pension fund has less than 46 cents set aside for every dollar it owes retired teachers, and its liabilities grow by roughly $2 billion a year no matter what the state contributes, according to the state's own actuarial valuation as of July 1, 2024. Governor Mikie Sherrill's response, in the FY2027 budget she signed on June 30, was to fully fund the pension system at $7.3 billion — 12% of a record $60.7 billion spending plan — while leaving every structural driver of the shortfall untouched. That's not a recovery plan. That's a...

The recent oil-price plunge again reminds us that markets are smarter than experts.  It’s not that markets are never wrong; however, when they are, they correct themselves.  In contrast when experts are wrong, they can stay wrong for an extended period—and ironically, continue to remain “experts.” An Investopedia story in March captured the prevailing wisdom of experts in the U.S.-Iran conflict’s early days: Market watchers are increasingly pessimistic about a swift return to normal for oil markets…”  The New...

Elon Musk’s enormous wealth will soon enough appear small. For evidence, see a popular chart listing the looming federal tax bills for multi-billionaires in the U.S. Musk will apparently be assessed $26 billion next year, Jeff Bezos $23 billion, and so on. The enormity of the numbers is troubling, but more troubling is how free market types are addressing the numbers. They’re making the rather simplistic point that if Musk and other multi-billionaires faced a 100% wealth tax, their wealth would still only pay off a tiny fraction of the national debt. As always, they’re...

Fundamental principles do not change with the passage of time. Perhaps this is because we actively protect and manage them so they remain unyielding. While principles can be refined at the margins, their core must never be shaken. There can be no compromise or boundaries in upholding them. The Watergate scandal is a defining moment in American history that reaffirmed the principle that "not even the highest power stands above the law." The reason Americans judge this event as profoundly significant is that it salvaged a crumbling principle and reestablished a sacred boundary: it practically...

On June 26 the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission made a request that sounds like plain good sense. Antitrust cases drag on for years, Andrew Ferguson said, so the courts should rewrite their own rules and move them faster. Nobody rises to defend a five-year lawsuit, which is exactly why the idea deserves a second look. Because Ferguson named the price of speed himself. Getting monopoly cases "to move at the pace of merger cases," he allowed, might mean the parties "don't get to do 12 expert reports." That is not trimming delay. It is cutting the evidence, and it is most reckless in the...

Headline Index Jumps 3.0 Points to 45.5, the Best Monthly Gain Since November 2024, as the Six-Month Outlook Climbs Across All 21 Demographic Groups Consumer sentiment rebounded in July as the RealClearMarkets/TIPP Economic Optimism Index, the first monthly reading of U.S. consumer confidence, climbed to 45.5 from 42.5 in June, a 3.0-point (7.1%) gain. It is the sharpest monthly increase in the index since November 2024, breaking a three-month stretch of flat readings near April's lows. Despite the rebound, the index has now remained below the neutral 50 mark for eleven consecutive...

I believe the Trump Administration made the right decision by not automatically renewing the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement this week. That shouldn't be viewed as a rejection of free trade. It should be viewed as an acknowledgment that trade agreements deserve stringent review. The purpose of these reviews is not to create uncertainty or political theater. It is to honestly evaluate whether an agreement negotiated years ago is still producing the outcomes it was intended to deliver for American workers, manufacturers, farmers, and small businesses. In other words, the review is not the...

Trade reports are like oceans. Much of the action happens beneath the surface.  That is the lesson of today’s trade report, which showed a rising deficit in May, albeit one that came in narrower than expectations. The U.S. goods and services trade deficit rose to $77.6 billion. The goods deficit widened to $106.5 billion. Exports fell, imports rose, and net exports now appear likely to subtract modestly from second-quarter GDP growth.  On the surface, that looks like a setback.  But the deeper currents tell a more complicated — and more important —...

The proposed merger of Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern is about life and death. Yes, you read that right. Which requires a brief digression.  Specifically, to Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump in 2016. Remember when partisans of both claimed the election would decide whether the U.S. went the way of Venezuela, or not?  Life or death in politics is generally a fraud, though it’s a device used by politicians and partisans alike. Elect me or my candidate to “save” the people from all manner of horrors. It’s nonsense, and it should be treated as...

Public sentiment regarding AI, and the data centers that drive it, is becoming increasingly negative, yet AI continues to receive trillions of dollars from investors on Wall Street and beyond. Despite the mind-blowing levels of investment, many policymakers don’t share the same enthusiasm, and in many cases, policy trends are moving the opposite direction. Recently, Seattle followed New York’s lead by imposing a one-year moratorium on new data centers. At the same time, Illinois and Arizona have halted tax incentives for new data centers. These actions aren’t...

The White House recently made a move that may leave many Americans wondering: wait, the federal government was still doing that? Under a recent executive order, the federal government began phasing out paper checks and moving payments to electronic systems. For a country that leads the world in technology and finance, the surprising part is not that Washington is modernizing. It is that it took this long. Paper checks have outlived their usefulness. More than three decades after online banking became routine, government payments, rent, refunds, and other routine transactions still...