RealClearMarkets Articles

Walmart’s market capitalization recently exceeded $1 trillion, making the retailing giant the second non-tech company (Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway was the first) to join the trillion-dollar club. Businessman Sam Walton opened the first Walmart in 1962 in Bentonville, Arkansas. Over the next twenty years, Walmart expanded throughout the south. In the eighties and nineties, Walmart opened stores in the rest of the country. By 1995 there was at least one Walmart in every state. As well as stores in Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and other...

Referencing “pole attachments” is usually good for a cheap laugh at telecom functions. For decades, commissioners at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) have leaned on the topic, which involves literally attaching wires to utility poles, to illustrate the un-sexiness of much of their work—double entendres aside. Yet, the harmless chuckles often obscure the importance of the matter. The ability for cable and fiber companies to run wires on utility poles can make or break Internet connectivity for millions of Americans, particularly as the Commerce Department seeks to...

Every leader wants to build a high-performance team. We chase growth, tighten operations, craft strategic plans, and track the metrics that signal success. Yet even when the strategy is sound and the talent is strong, organizations can lose momentum. More often than not, the culprit is culture left unattended. If you read through Harvard Business Review’s recent article on management, you’ll notice a theme: Culture is at the center.  Culture works quietly in the background, shaping outcomes in ways that are easy to overlook. It affects how people arrive each day,...

John Tamny is one of the most eloquent defenders of free trade writing today. His pushback on a recent piece of mine deserves a genuine reply that is not confined to 280 characters.  He reads my argument as an apology for trading with China. It isn’t, but the miscommunication is instructive. Tamny argues (correctly) that trade lifts both parties and that this is the “best, most peaceful foreign policy mankind has ever conceived.”  He is exactly correct and I agree with every word of it.  Adam Smith, Frederic Bastiat, and indeed the entire free-trade tradition...

I’m very grateful to Dave Hebert that he’s never gone wobbly on the genius of free trade. He’s right that we agree. Why my response to his? It’s an attempt to convince him not about free trade, but about currency, IP, and so-called “trade deficits.” Will I succeed? It recalls the line from the great essayist, Joseph Epstein: while he’s never lost an argument, he’s also never won one. Alas, this isn’t an argument. Just an exchange of ideas. Hebert writes that “When China holds down the value of the renminbi, it’s making Chinese...

Does anyone else get a little weary of the peanut gallery every time a court issues a ruling on a matter of national interest? Have you read Hobbes, Locke, the authors of the Federalist Papers, those scholars opposed to ratification of the Constitution and 500 years of legal history? No, I didn’t think so. Please leave the punditry to me! Within minutes of a major decision, social media fills with confident declarations about what the Constitution “obviously” requires. The problem is that most of those offering commentary have little understanding of how our legal system...

Artificial intelligence’s (AI’s) alleged consumption of water and energy has become a major point of concern for policymakers. The issue was highlighted in President Trump’s recent State of the Union speech, where Trump announced he will forge deals with tech companies over energy consumption. While voluntary efforts to increase power generation are laudable, much of the underlying discussion is riddled with half-truths, incomplete information, and blatant falsehoods. Unsurprisingly, this misinformation extends all the way up to members of Congress, who can wield the...

Note: Part 1 showed how Betting Markets can complement and substitute polls. My “Safe Bet” op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (August 1, 2003), suggested that relying on information derived from existing financial markets, and complementing it with those from “betting markets” about military and political events, would offer better ways to manage businesses than relying on military and other experts’ opinions or polls.  Since then, betting markets, particularly in the UK, ventured into political bets.  In the U.S., Polymarkets and Kalshi are much in the...

As politically charged buzzwords go, “affordability” should not strike anyone as particularly novel. After all, if most elections are decided by how voters feel about their own economic situation (see, “It’s the economy, stupid”), isn’t affordability the core issue of every election? Affordability became a key slogan due to the dramatic price increases during the last Democratic administration's high inflation years and its subsequent use in campaigns over the last two elections. Exactly what costs are of greatest concern to American voters? Is it...

To discover the U.S. and what the Founding Fathers meant, drive a state or two or three of the United States. About the opening sentence, it’s not a trite tribute to the “Real America” that can allegedly be found outside its cities. The energy of its cities arguably define the United States like nothing else. Just the same, what renders the U.S. different from the rest of the world is what Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane referred to as a “fierce individualism” that gives it life. Which explains the call for Americans to get to know the U.S. by driving it. In...

I used to think housing affordability was just another talking point in America’s political theater—a play in search of a playwright. Los Angeles is now preparing to host the 2028 Olympics, and a new report warns that as many as 320,000 visitors could be left scrambling for accommodations because hotel capacity will not meet peak demand. The proposed solution is to expand short-term rentals. Yet in Washington, the same platforms are cast as villains in a housing crisis that has persisted for decades. Lawmakers debate banning Wall Street firms from...

Why is the federal government deploying antitrust laws to help unions in collective bargaining?  This is the question facing President Trump’s FTC and it may stop mergers for that reason. Now, California is also considering passing its own antitrust law to do the same. One of the first, and most surprising, actions of the Trump FTC was to announce its adherence to the 2023 Merger Guidelines, which the Biden Department of Justice and FTC had promulgated. There have been several editions of the Merger Guidelines since their 1982 creation. The Biden version was the first to ask how a...

“Roaches check in, but they don’t check out.” That was the iconic line from the 1970s/80s Black Flag Roach Motel ads. At risk of wasting words, roaches would enter traps that they would never be able to exit… The ad springs to mind as man bites dog, and Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) teams up with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) on the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. The bill aims to “modernize housing policy” and “boost supply” among other things. Which on its own is funny: while we have supercomputers of the iPhone and Android variety that sit in our...

One of modern politicians’ worst habits is “doing something” following a natural or man-made disaster like a hurricane, mass shooting, or financial crisis. The “something” is usually an expansion of government power. Rarely, if ever, do legislators ask whether existing regulations may have helped cause the problem—or whether the government’s solution creates new problems or fails to prevent future ones. Even rarer is for politicians to concede that there was nothing the government or private sector could have done to prevent the crisis du...

The February Consumer Price Index provides another piece of evidence that the Trump economic program is working. Inflation is not accelerating as critics predicted. Instead, it is stabilizing at levels far below the surge Americans endured earlier in the decade.  Headline CPI rose 2.4 percent over the past year, with core inflation at 2.5 percent—both exactly in line with expectations and far below the roughly 9 percent inflation peak reached during the Biden administration in 2022.  Just as important, the monthly numbers confirm that underlying inflation pressures remain...

The Hong Kong Stock Exchange shot to the top as the world’s foremost venue for initial public offerings in 2025 and pushes ahead strongly into 2026. Meanwhile, London for example, slipped out of the top 20 IPO marketplaces, overtaken by leading financial hubs such as Singapore, and even some developing economies such as Mexico. With a mere 23 companies going public in the latest year on record, 9 on the main market and 14 on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM), up from 18 in 2024, London's fall out of favor among investors seemingly, cannot be...

More than 50 years ago, Seymour Lipset summarized the big discrepancies in the polls about domestic issues, about Presidential candidates, and about foreign policies.  The issues pollsters looked into were eerily similar to those in the fore now.  In November 1975, pollsters asked if people favored giving New York City federal funds to rescue it.  The answers were significantly different when pollsters got results from face-to-face interviews than when they got them over the phone.  In January 1975, Gallup and Harris asked people to choose between methods to reduce...

Conservatives and libertarians talk rhapsodically about markets, while sometimes ignoring the market signals that reject their occasional alarmism. Which is why Montgomery College economics professor David Youngberg shouldn’t be singled out for predicting a debt crisis. Most conservatives and libertarians do. In Youngberg’s case, hopefully he’ll see this critique for what it is: a push for him to re-think who gets to run up debt, and why. About what you’re reading, it should be said up front that government spending is by far the biggest, most economy-sapping tax of...

In 2010, Kevin Warsh told a room full of Wall Street executives that the Federal Reserve is not a repair shop. His meaning was plain: step in when markets seize up, step out when they stabilize. A sign on the Fed door, by that reasoning, might read: "Emergency repairs only." A narrow Fed Put. Now Warsh is headed to the Senate Banking Committee as the nominee for Fed chair. Senator John Kennedy, a persistent critic of Fed overreach and the moral hazard it breeds, is likely to pounce. You can almost hear the drawl: "Mr. Warsh, today's market expects the Fed to fix everything from a bad earnings...