RealClearMarkets Articles

Mexico was swept by a wave of violence following the recent killing of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, a.k.a. "El Mencho," the leader of a major drug cartel, by the nation's armed forces with intelligence support from the United States. Historically, the death of a cartel boss triggers two events: an immediate spasm of revenge against the government, followed by bloody internal struggles as factions move to fill a power vacuum. Both are already happening. This is just the latest development in an accelerating and highly visible campaign by the Trump Administration to take on narcotics and...

The latest panic over private credit says more about Washington than it does about finance. A few major funds have limited withdrawals. Some software-heavy loans are under pressure. Critics are reviving the old script about “shadow banking” and fresh bailout chatter, while others warn that private assets are creeping into retirement accounts with risks many investors may not fully understand.  Those concerns are worth taking seriously. But they still skip the real problem: government helped create this structure in the first place, and more government control would likely...

Both Congress and the Trump Administration are desperate to find ways to relieve the cost pressures currently stifling the U.S. economy, but their efforts thus far have done little to alleviate inflation, which surged this month.  For instance, both want to pretend that a raft of price fixing or corporate greed has mysteriously accelerated in recent years, creating higher prices, and that more antitrust enforcement or selectively calling out companies that raise prices will bring down inflation and solve the problem.  Yet, there is no reason to think that such political...

After a decade of explosive growth, digital assets are rightfully moving into the financial mainstream. Financial institutions from NYSE to Nasdaq are investing in plans to integrate digital assets and tokenized securities. Even U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Paul Atkins has claimed that much of the financial system could move on-chain within "a couple of years."  In preparation for this shift, the SEC is expected to announce an innovation exemption for tokenized securities in the coming days. Yet there’s a looming question on what level of...

The launch of Fox News remains one of the great free market stories of modern times. While conservatives had long expressed frustration with the left-wing bias that defined traditional media, Fox News met that rising frustration with reporting that incorporated a conservative view of domestic and global news that had historically been ignored by news sources.  Notable about the rise of Fox was that Democrats weren’t fans of the nascent news network. In a preview of critiques commonly heard today, they referred to Fox News as a "right-wing propaganda machine” that was engaging...

The House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Health is holding a series of hearings on health care affordability, each one focusing on a different aspect of the health care system. The hearing held on March 18th of this year addressed health care providers, and included testimony from representatives of medical groups, patient advocates, and hospital administrators. Witnesses claimed that one of the biggest reasons for the increase in health care costs was consolidation. This is the result of large hospitals buying smaller hospitals, clinics, and private...

In a recent interview with former U.S. Comptroller General David M. Walker, he made something clear: Social Security is under serious pressure, and the timeline is closer than most people think. He didn’t hedge. He said the system will run out of money by 2032.  Not decades from now, but within the working lifetime of millions of Americans who are currently counting on it. And yet, despite warnings like this, most people are still building their entire retirement around a system they don’t fully understand and cannot control. I later had a conversation that brought this...

In thirty years of reviewing fixed-income allocations for single-family offices, I have seen the same mistake repeated with impressive consistency: clients reach for a familiar yield without asking whether the underlying credit has structurally changed. The tax exemption is real, the retail demand is deep, and the inertia is powerful. California municipal bonds are testing all three of those assumptions right now. The bull case is well known. California is the world’s fourth-largest economy with a GDP exceeding $4.1 trillion. The double federal-and-state tax exemption translates to a...

Tax Day marks the end of many Americans’ annual tax stress, but for high-income taxpayers with complex returns, the 2026 anxiety season may drag on for a very long time. With the IRS losing more than a quarter of its  employees during 2025 – 28,000, according to The National Taxpayer Advocate – complex tax returns are likely to face a long slog in processing. Since those complex returns are generally the province of business owners and wealthy individuals, big questions that translate into large dollar amounts could take months (or even years) to answer. That...

Economic thought with any pretense of seriousness is all about removing all barriers to production. No doubt taxes are a barrier, as are regulations, tariffs, currency devaluation, and government spending. Whatever inhibits production is paid for right now. The problem presently is that even the right-of-center economic religions, though they would nod their heads to much of what you’ve just read, don’t quite grasp the truth of it. It can be found in their commentary about tax day. A recently published piece at American Institute for Economic Research vivified this. The opinion...

For decades, April 15 has been a day of mourning for America’s blue-collar and middle-class families — the day the taxman takes his annual bite. This year, however, Tax Day feels a lot more like Christmas morning.  Why? Because millions of Americans are discovering that President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill (BBB) is doing exactly what it was designed to do: put more money back into the pockets of the people who actually work for a living.  As I predicted, when Americans opened their Tax Day checks, this would amount to one of the biggest and most broad-based rebate...

Balancing the budget will never, ever shrink the federal government opposite what the experts at Cato, Mercatus, and other right-of-center think tanks tell you. The reason why can yet again be found in national debt of $39 trillion. The debt is a loud, market signal that government revenues in the future will make those of the present appear small by comparison. Markets aren’t stupid, and there’s no way there would be all this debt absent lender optimism about soaring government revenues in the future. That’s why a balanced budget amendment today, tomorrow or ten years from...

Nowadays, especially as people are fretting about AI taking their jobs, and wondering what can be done to address “growing inequality,” and the “hollowing out of manufacturing,” some pundits wonder whether it is time to re-imagine capitalism. This sort of thinking is visible on both sides of the political spectrum – in that respect, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have more in common than either would have us believe. But instead of re-imagining capitalism, I’d say we need to un-forget the facts about it that we should have known for many years, and...

There was a time when social media felt like a natural extension of real life, a digital space where relationships could continue beyond physical proximity. You logged in to see your friends, check in on family, and share moments that mattered, whether significant or seemingly ordinary. The experience carried a quiet simplicity because it was grounded in something real. People chose who to follow, and platforms respected that choice as the foundation of the entire system. That foundation has not disappeared overnight, but it has been steadily eroded. Today, when the average user opens a...

In August 1955, Isaac Asimov published a short story called “Franchise” that described the 2008 presidential election. By then, a supercomputer called Multivac had made actual voting obsolete. Instead of polling millions of citizens, Multivac selected one perfectly representative American — Norman Muller, a department store clerk from Bloomington, Indiana — interrogated him about the price of eggs and other seemingly trivial matters while monitoring his physiological responses, and computed the national result. Norman never voted for any candidate. He didn’t need...

March’s producer price report is another reminder that not all inflation is created equal. A commodity-driven jump tied largely to energy is one thing. A generalized inflationary breakout across goods, services, and margins is something very different. This report looks much more like an energy-driven shock than a broad inflationary resurgence.  Yes, headline producer prices rose 0.5 percent in March. But that increase came in well below expectations, and the details matter far more than the top-line number.  The real story is the same one we have been seeing across several...

Healthcare is one of the only markets where consumers buy services without seeing the price ahead of time. Patients are routinely expected to agree to tests, scans, and procedures with no idea of the price—only to find out weeks later, if they ever do, that the same service could have been provided for thousands of dollars cheaper down the street. This is a failure of basic market information. When prices are hidden from patients, competition breaks down, and providers face little pressure to keep costs low. Restoring price transparency is the first step to making the healthcare market...

Federal housing policy is afflicted by several shortcomings—it is expensive, outdated, and inflexible. The states, free from these restrictions, have begun experimenting with tailored approaches. Congress should take note. In 1932 Justice Brandeis observed that “one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” By its nature, the states as laboratories do not suffer from the shortcomings that...

Something cracked in private credit this month, and the men who manage systemic risk for a living are saying so. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon's just-released 2025 annual shareholder letter warns that concerns about private credit - including "underwriting quality or exposure to software companies that may be negatively affected by AI" - are "a reminder that the credit cycle has not been repealed." His predecessor Lloyd Blankfein went further on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast: "I don't feel the storm, but the horses are starting to whinny in the corral." JPMorgan has already voted with...