RealClearMarkets Articles

Generation Z will be the richest, most fortunate generation in the history of the richest, most fortunate nation in the world, the U.S. That is, until the generation that follows Gen Z reaches adulthood and beyond. Seriously, what any “Boomer,” “Gen X,” or “Millennial” would give to be in their twenties today, or better yet, just born. Even better would be to not having been conceived yet. Think how lucky those kids will be. The optimism is rooted in the obvious truth that we haven’t scratched the surface of technological advance. That’s the bad...

From Beaufort, South Carolina to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and from Jefferson City to Providence, a familiar policy script is playing out in statehouses and city councils across North America: ban the plastic bag, feel virtuous, and declare victory. What rarely follows is honest scrutiny of whether the ban actually helps the environment, or whether it quietly makes things worse while blocking the very technologies that could solve the plastic problem for real. Let's start with the bag itself. The war on single-use plastic bags has long been waged on the assumption that they are uniquely...

In Greek mythology, Icarus sought to escape prison from the Island of Crete. With feathers and beeswax, his father helped build wings. The wings worked. Icarus soared. Aspiring to soar higher despite his father’s warning, Icarus flew too close to the sun. The wax melted, his wings fell apart, and Icarus perished. Sometimes, in efforts seemingly to “boldly go where no one has gone before,” our political leaders may steer too close to the sun. This seems to be happening with President Trump, the economy and his desire to manage the world. The “golden age” he has...

A claim that repeatedly clashes with observable reality demands scrutiny. Such claims survive only when contradictory evidence is buried, data selectively presented, or fear trumps fact. Such is the case with the apocalyptic narrative of climate change. One among the many pretenses of doomsayers is that shifting climate patterns threaten global food security. Environmental websites like Mongabay warn that “climate change, extreme weather, and conflict exacerbate the global food crisis,” as if harvests are failing everywhere. “Science” blogs declare that...

Two of the more numerate shops in the prediction business published 2026 World Cup probabilities within days of each other. Goldman Sachs ran 50,000 Monte Carlo tournaments off an Elo-anchored Poisson goal model. Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin ran 100,000 off PELE, the successor to the soccer ratings he built in his ESPN days. In addition, we have the wisdom of crowds: roughly half a billion dollars of real money on Polymarket and Kalshi, alongside the sportsbooks. Almost every gap between the models and the betting line traces back to specific modeling decisions. The forecasts...

TV’s talking heads, even on America’s more sophisticated financial news networks, seem determined to turn every bit of good macroeconomic news into yet another tortured argument for a Fed rate hike. Nowhere was that more evident than with today’s most excellent Trump jobs report.  The headline number was strong. Nonfarm payrolls rose by 172,000 in May, roughly double market expectations. The unemployment rate held steady at 4.3 percent. March and April were revised up by a combined 93,000 jobs. Private payrolls rose by 120,000. Average hourly earnings increased 0.3...

The policy of President Donald Trump has, thus far, sided with innovation, particularly with respect to artificial intelligence (AI). But of late, a safety-obsessed insurgency has arisen within the White House. Weeks of public statements and counterstatements, leaks and speculation, have at least yielded an executive order, published on June 2, which directs the creation of a “voluntary” program to vet “covered frontier models” for the purpose of maintaining cybersecurity. The order’s import and implications do not immediately reveal themselves. Indeed, its chief...

In his 2008 book The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson observed that the English speaking peoples are obsessed with housing, and that “No other fact of financial life has such a hold on the popular imagination.” By extension, Ferguson might agree that no other market good brings out the stupid within American pundits, economists, and politicians like housing. To see why, readers should Google “housing affordability crisis.” Though be careful if so. Paraphrasing the great Christopher Buckley, your computer might explode. Not only is it accepted wisdom from the experts on...

In April 2021, the Federal Reserve Board — an institution that employs more than 400 PhD economists — told the American public that rising inflation was "transitory." By June 2022, headline CPI had hit 9.1%. Those same forecasters had been wrong by an average of 2.57 percentage points through 2021–2023. The preceding decade offered no comfort: they'd overpredicted inflation by an average of 0.54 percentage points from 2012 to 2020. The direction of the error changed. The overconfidence didn't. To be precise about what the Fed got wrong: it wasn't the cause of the price surge...

Innovation has driven America for the last 250 years. In fact, patents were the only “right” provided for in the original Constitution. This didn’t happen without debate, but those opposed to intellectual property rights largely changed their minds after they began seeing the benefits of providing an incentive to innovators which helped drive technology forward.  Some of the first inventions that changed the trajectory of our country involved increasing the lifespan of our nation’s infrastructure. For instance, one of the earliest patents was granted for a method...

You know what the most necessary ingredient is for capitalism to thrive? I'll give you three guesses. No, it's not lower interest rates. It's not better management of the Phillips Curve by the (useless) Federal Reserve, and it's certainly not pouring more tax dollars into our useless education system. Three strikes and you're out. The most important element for capitalism to thrive is, well... capital. That wasn't a trick question. The supply of capital creates innovation and, ultimately, increased wealth. Capitalism does not merely require capital; it requires capital velocity—the...

“Productive labor may render a nation poorer, if the wealth it produces - that is, the increase it makes in the stock of useful or agreeable things - be of a kind not immediately wanted.” – John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, p. 76 Try to start a business by promising to create lots of jobs. Investors will run from you, and that’s not because they hate workers. If anything, what you’ve read is a signal of how much investors revere workers. Eager to achieve upward sloping returns, they want the human capital they back with investment capital to be...

The legal profession has become a primary source of immense social costs that actively undermine the nation’s democratic and economic foundations. Those costs manifest in concrete, highly destructive strategies utilized by elite government attorneys to advance authoritarian maneuvers. The public should be profoundly alarmed when lawyers within the Department of Justice’s "Weaponization Working Group" break institutional protocols to orchestrate vindictive criminal indictments against political adversaries; when senior legal officials engineer a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded...

Housing is presently out of reach for many Americans. Mortgage rates remain above 6%. Existing-home prices are above $400,000. Sales are weak, and available houses are increasingly difficult to find. Some in the real estate industry are framing private housing listings as “seller choice.” That sounds good. Sellers should have choices. But the real question is: choice to do what? Choice to get less exposure, fewer bidders, weaker price discovery, and a process that may benefit the agent more than the homeowner? That is not a choice most sellers would knowingly make if the...

There is a considerable degree of angst about the seismic changes affecting major college sports in the last few years, and there’s no indication that these changes will stop anytime soon. For instance, the college basketball playoff will soon expand from 68 to 76 teams in 2027, and it appears likely that the college football playoff will soon expand as well. What’s more, the antitrust settlement in the House vs. NCAA lawsuit resulted in a revenue sharing agreement that directed $2.8 billion for player compensation, which has led to many schools choosing to reduce funding for...

Serial entrepreneur and Unicoin cryptocurrency co-founder Alex Konanykhin launched his latest venture at the Prediction Conference in Las Vegas last month.  SafeBets, says Konanykhin, is “a first of its kind prediction platform where users can earn substantial rewards” without risking any of their own money. “SafeBets introduces something the financial worlds has never seen – risk-free betting,” says Konanykhin. “Many people have the analytical skill to read markets better than the crowd, but to date, there has been no accessible, risk-free way to be...

Consumer sentiment held near its lows in June as the RealClearMarkets/TIPP Economic Optimism Index, the first monthly reading of U.S. consumer confidence, edged down to 42.5 from 42.6 in May, a marginal 0.1-point (0.2%) decline. The reading marks a third straight month near April’s lows, confirming that the index has settled into a holding pattern at a depressed level rather than rebounding. The index has now remained below the neutral 50 mark for ten consecutive months, keeping the nation in what we classify as the pessimism zone. June’s reading is 13.4% below the 305-month...

Members of Gen Z won’t just benefit from the genius of artificial intelligence (AI) throughout their careers, they’ll also benefit from a federal government thankfully hamstrung by past spending errors. Lucky Gen Z. Mindless as Social Security and Medicare are, and economically damaging as they were, they’ll spare those entering the working world now from all sorts of new government spending in all sorts of areas that government shouldn’t be involved in. This lack of expansive government spending will be great for young Americans, and by extension great for the U.S....

You own Apple. At least, that is what your brokerage app tells you. If your zero-commission broker collapses tomorrow morning, you cannot simply transfer that fractional position to safety. It is not transferable in kind. It must be liquidated, back to the same balance sheet that is failing. You do not hold a share. You hold a claim. The difference is not semantic. In 2008, Lehman Brothers' clients learned the devastating difference between holding property and holding a contractual claim against a bankrupt entity. Today, that same vulnerability has been engineered into the portfolios of...