RealClearMarkets Articles

Only twelve ships crossed the Strait of Hormuz in a recent 24-hour period, according to Reuters reporting based on vessel-tracking data. Before the war, between 125 and 140 ships typically moved in and out of the strait each day. This issue goes beyond just shipping; it serves as a warning about the conditions necessary for trade, investment, and enterprise to operate effectively. A durable commercial order depends on more than markets. The situation also relies on institutions that ensure market credibility, such as secure transportation, enforceable contracts, reliable delivery...

Senator Elizabeth Warren has never seen a private financial institution she didn't want to seize control of, and her latest obsession is with private credit, the burgeoning sector of non-bank lenders that increasingly finance small and medium-sized businesses.  In her May 13, 2026 letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, the Massachusetts socialist warns hysterically of a fabricated "private-credit-induced financial crisis" and demands sweeping new government controls that would choke off the availability of capital by extending the exact cost drivers that...

Maya MacGuineas has been predicting budgetary and Social Security doom for ages. Of course she has. What does she have to lose? If she’s right after having been wrong, she can claim that she was a seer all along. If MacGuineas remains wrong, she can simply go quiet. Since Washington, D.C. is dense with budgetary experts predicting the same as she, MacGuineas will hardly stand out. In a recent piece for Barron’s, MacGuineas wrote as she always has about doom ahead: “Social Security Is Broken, Benefit Cuts for the Rich Are the Fix.” Except that if the capacity of the...

Jack Schlossberg, son of Caroline Kennedy and a candidate for my new Congressional district, NY-12, has made a striking tax policy proposal: a standard renters deduction. With 69% of New Yorkers renting their homes, the idea is fitting for a candidate campaigning in the heart of Midtown Manhattan — even if it sounds unconventional at first blush. Critiques from political commentators and policy analysts range from dismissiveness of the policy’s efficacy to outright attacks on Schlossberg’s seriousness. But this kind of reflexive skepticism misses the broader point:...

Let’s stop pretending.  Maine’s new tax on millionaires is being sold as a narrow measure aimed only at the wealthy. Signed into law by Governor Janet Mills, the policy imposes a 2% surcharge on income over $1 million, effective January 1, 2026.   California also has proposed a ballot initiative taxing billionaires a one-time 5% tax to be voted on in November of this year. The state is looking to raise funds by targeting approximately 200-214 of the state’s wealthiest taxpayers.   On its surface, the...

Mitch Daniels looks admiringly in the mirror through the words he puts on a page. See his latest Washington Post op-ed, and his comment that “No impulse is more human than wishfulness, the tendency to grasp at any straw that enables us to avert our eyes from difficult realities and put off facing them.” Daniels is referencing the national debt, but really he’s talking about himself. Daniels sees himself as the sober man in a rather small room filled by the libertarians at Cato, the conservatives at AEI, and a few left-leaning Keynesians at Brookings, all who revel in what...

Abigail Spanberger rates endless scorn for her newly passed “Family Leave Act.” It is feel-goodism on steroids. An employee gets 12 weeks off for any number of reasons at 80% of the average state wage. Everybody in the Commonwealth is taxed for this benefit. One can work for 40 or 50 years, have the state withdraw money from every paycheck, and never avail oneself of “family leave.” Every employee will be eligible for 12 weeks of paid leave every year. Eligibility is not just for having a child. It exists if the employee “claims” to be taking care of...

The M&A market entered 2026 with force that didn't build gradually, it released. Global volume hit $1.22 trillion in Q1, a 26% surge over the prior year and the strongest quarterly start since 2021. The mechanism matters. Lina Khan ran one of the most aggressive merger-challenge regimes in FTC history from June 2021 through the administration change, creating a four-year deal desert across tech, healthcare, retail, and financial services. When that pressure lifted, the $4.3 trillion in private equity dry powder that had been waiting for a signal did not gradually return to work. It was...

Congress is finally moving on housing. President Trump is pushing for the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, the Senate passed its version 89-10, and the House recently released an amended version in May that tries to smooth out some of the bill’s rougher edges. Housing affordability is a major economic problem facing American families. Mortgage rates are above 6 percent (and rising), existing-home prices remain above $400,000, and America is short more than 4 million homes. Young families feel locked out. Renters feel squeezed. Parents wonder whether their kids will ever own a home. So,...

The European Union (EU) cannot keep itself from overregulating the digital world. Last month, the European Commission (EC) published a proposal to compel Google Search to share data with competing digital services. “With this public consultation, we want to hear from the market on the most effective ways for Google to share search data with competing online search engine providers, to continue our push for innovation and fair competitiveness,” stated Henna Virkkunen, executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security, and democracy. The EU seeks simultaneously to benefit...

President Trump’s trip to China brings the economic implications of America’s war against Iran into sharper focus. The fact that the Taiwan Strait generated more news than the Strait of Hormuz during the recent news cycle, is a telling indicator. Critics keep framing this as crass resource politics: oil, opening the Strait of Hormuz waterway, and keeping gas prices down for American consumers. Granted, we all want the price at the pump to come down, and previous administrations have cried wolf about weapons of mass destruction in the Mideast before, but the naysayers are wrong on...

Congress is finally moving toward cryptocurrency regulation. The problem is that policymakers still largely treat crypto as one homogeneous market. Economically, cryptocurrency consists of several fundamentally different categories, including speculative assets, stablecoins, and payment infrastructure systems. Some digital assets function primarily as high-risk speculative investments. Others function more like tokenized cash or settlement infrastructure designed to lower transaction costs and speed up payments. Yet much of the current regulatory debate continues collapsing these systems into...

The Fed made its first mistake in 2021. It misread a supply shock as a transitory blip, fell behind, and spent two years engineering the steepest tightening campaign since Paul Volcker's early-1980s crackdown. Now, with April CPI at 3.8%, producer prices up 6.0% year over year, and fed funds futures pricing a meaningful chance of a rate hike before year-end, there is a real risk the institution overcorrects in the opposite direction and makes the second mistake to go with the first. Inflation is real. The gasoline bill is real. The food shock is real. But the boogeyman -- the 1970s-style...

"I need my papa!" That's what a five-year old Mexican child said to her mother, according to the Washington Post. Her father had been deported. How to explain to a small child why your father isn't around, and why you may not be seeing him for a long while?  Some will not unreasonably say "I need my papa" is but an anecdote, and they would be correct, but add enough of them up...The Washington Post reports that the majority of deportees are males, and compared to past deportation efforts, those incarcerated before being sent away (sometimes to countries they're not from) aren't criminals...

One of the side effects of our misguided monetary policy in recent decades is the spike in home ‘values’.  Housing is one of the most common inflation hedges this side of gold.  It gives investors a relatively safe place to park their resources, and put them to work.  But it’s not just big institutional investors who act as landlords.  Almost 9 in 10 such homes are owned by those who can count their entire portfolio on one hand.  So while federal lawmakers bemoan the ‘affordability’ crisis that they arguably created, state and local...

With headlines dominated by the Iran War, the resulting increase in gas prices, and the attempted assassination of President Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, it is understandable that the resignation of Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer did not receive a lot of attention. And yet she was one of President Trump’s most controversial nominees, who resigned because of what, in more normal times, would have been a headline-making scandal. Chavez-DeRemer was originally recommended to President Trump by Teamster’s Union President Sean O’Brien. Although...

The Senate is expected to vote soon on Kevin Warsh’s nomination to serve as the next chair of the Federal Reserve. Warsh is widely expected to be confirmed. If confirmed, Warsh will inherit an economy with significant long-term potential, but also a growing challenge on Main Street: uncertainty surrounding interest rates, financing conditions, and the affordability of capital for small businesses. In conversations I conducted with small business owners across manufacturing, transportation, construction, equipment, logistics, and services while researching my recent book on economic...

A little over ten years ago, when smartphones were still sufficiently new to mention, I attended a talk by an economist who argued that the rise of the smartphone was not, or at least not primarily, a technological phenomenon. He argued that if technological feasibility had been the only constraint, smartphones could have become a thing much earlier.  We should think of them as an indirect product of a legal innovation, not just a technological one. He was talking about how, in the 1990s, we started to use market mechanisms to allocate usage rights of the electromagnetic spectrum, which...

Kristina Crane gets to watch her grandson’s little league baseball games. On its own that’s a nice thought, but it’s a miracle in consideration of the fact that Crane lives in Falls Church, VA, and Harrison Crane lives in Mountain Brook, AL. Crane has the GameChanger app installed on her iPhone. Recently Harrison hit a home run. Stop and think about what amazing progress this represents. As recently as the 1990s, 900-976-1313 was the number sports crazed fans called to get score updates. Over 50 million called in 1981 alone. These were college and professional games. Yet in...