RealClearMarkets Articles

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...

Most discussions of financial stability focus on prices, valuations, and economic indicators. Yet far less attention is paid to a more basic question: what do investors legally own when they buy stocks and funds through a brokerage account? The answer is not what most investors assume. Over the past several decades, deliberate changes to securities law and market infrastructure quietly redefined ownership itself, with little sustained public debate. In ordinary times, those legal distinctions rarely draw notice. But when brokers fail or markets come under severe strain, they can determine...

Five years ago in another publication I asked a simple, uncomfortable question about the Project Artemis moon program: Why? At the time, the program was a Trump-era relic (est. 2017) being kept on life support by the Biden administration with a fresh coat of "identity politics" paint. By promising to put "the first woman and person of color on the Moon," NASA attempted to justify a grab-bag of rationales that never held up under scrutiny. Finally, after myriad failures and delays, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman confessed at a news conference, "This is just not the right...

To reference Neil Sedaka, who recently died at age 86, is to age oneself. Some of Sedaka’s most famous songs (“Laughter In the Rain,” “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do,” and “Love Will Keep Us Together”) were either performed by the songwriter/musician, or by other musicians in the 1970s. Which means that if you’re 34 while reading this, or even 44, odds are you’ve never heard of Sedaka. It’s an age thing, but age is in some ways the point of this opinion piece. Particularly for those too young to have heard of Sedaka.  In a recent...

Human beings love stories.  Among the biggest storytellers on Wall Street today are activist investors. They often present themselves as being on the “hero’s journey” – plucky investors battling entrenched management to restructure the company in question into a brighter future. Yet, it should shock nobody that the reality is often much different than the fairytale. Rather than providing a healthy check on poor governance, “shareholder activism” too often looks like financial impatience masquerading as strategy. The typical activist playbook is to...

When’s the last time you held a newspaper in your hands? Tick tock, tick tock… The question you’re contemplating comes from someone who daily reads the print editions of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post. Which is the point as readers will soon see. To read newspapers nowadays is to unwittingly seek attention. Some jokingly ask, “What’s that?” Others have jokingly expressed thrill that someone still reads newspapers... Despite this, “the press” is still the press. Take a recent column by the Wall Street...

In a recent interview at Semafor's Trust Media Summit in Washington, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr declared: "This isn't Ronald Reagan's FCC, and I think that's a good thing." He was responding to a question regarding some of his headline-grabbing "jawboning" actions against broadcasters' programming decisions.  I beg to differ. I don't think it's a "good thing" for Chairman Carr to proclaim that it's a good thing that the FCC he leads "isn't Ronald Reagan's FCC." After all, it was the Reagan FCC, under the leadership of then-Chairman Mark Fowler, that...

The math is simple, but Argentina keeps getting it wrong. The country is sitting on one of the world's largest shale formations—Vaca Muerta holds 16 billion barrels of oil and 308 trillion cubic feet of gas. Foreign companies are lining up to invest: Eni and Abu Dhabi’s XRG are co-developing a $20 billion LNG project with YPF targeting a mid-2026 Final Investment Decision, and total hydrocarbon investment is projected to hit $11 billion this year alone. (Shell, notably, exited a separate LNG phase in December 2025 citing scope changes—a reminder that investor patience has...

In Washington and on Wall Street, innovation is often associated with the largest corporations and billion-dollar R&D budgets.  But the data tell a different story.  According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, small businesses account for nearly half of private-sector employment and have consistently punched above their weight in innovation. In the first quarter of 2025 alone, small firms filed more than 8,000 new patents — a 12 percent increase year over year — outpacing the overall national patent growth rate. That entrepreneurial edge matters, especially...

The February jobs report will inevitably produce a round of cautionary headlines. The topline figure—nonfarm payrolls declining by 92,000—will be cited as evidence that the Trump economy is weakening.  That interpretation misses the larger story.  To understand what is really happening, let’s dig beneath the surface of the report and place the data in context.  First, the February payroll number was distorted by several temporary factors. Unseasonably cold weather disrupted construction, transportation, and other outdoor employment during the survey period....

In Denationalisation of Money: The Argument Refined, Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek argued for the benefits of a realm of competing, rather than monopoly, national currencies. Modern digital alternatives, including gold stablecoins, have a long shot at realizing Hayekian currency competition. While King Dollar remains the world’s leading currency and no obvious, credible competitors are breathing down its neck, policymakers shouldn’t take its dominance for granted. It’s not invincible. The “barbarous relic”—gold—is an interesting...

Ronald Reagan was a terrible president for “American oil.” He had nothing against crude, but Reagan did favor reversing the weak dollar policies embraced by Presidents Nixon and Carter in the 1970s, and that caused “oil shocks” that were really dollar shocks. The U.S. was far more “energy independent” during the 1970s under Presidents Nixon and Carter, and that was the economic problem. Essential as oil is to the abundant lives we lead, it insults economics to believe we must extract it here. There’s no need. The U.S. could be 100% bereft of oil, all...

America stands at an inflection point for infrastructure investment. The systems that move goods, power homes, and connect communities are ageing faster than they are being developed or replaced. At the same time, technological advances are reshaping how we move, communicate, and generate energy, making the cost of inaction higher than ever. It is a challenge faced by developed economies across the globe.   The American Society of Civil Engineers projects a $3.7 trillion infrastructure funding gap through 2033. This is a...

The Wall Street Journal, of all places, recently ran an article by one of its columnists arguing that “low taxes are becoming a problem for the economy.”  The author contends that the rich “scrimp on taxes,” and that populist pressure is building to make them pay more. Apparently, the author has never read any of the years of Wall Street Journal editorials that definitely do not support the notion that low taxes are a problem for the economy.  More seriously, the author must not be aware of the years of economic research and history which show conclusively...

Twenty years ago, experts predicted that people would eventually stop accumulating stuff as the digital age took hold. Why keep a collection of CDs when your music can be stored and sorted neatly on Spotify? What is the point of filing reams of paper documents when you can store everything in the cloud? And photo albums seem like relics when you have Google Photos.   But it didn’t work out as experts predicted. The modern economy hasn’t exactly encouraged the decluttering of our lives. E-commerce has made buying easier, expanded resale markets, and turned niche interests...

The classical liberal philosophy of limited government, free markets, and respect for the individual’s natural rights to life, liberty, and property originated in Europe. Unfortunately, the modern liberal idea that government should abridge natural rights for the people’s own good also originated in Europe and continues to displace classical liberalism. As in America, this has led to the sacrifice of much economic liberty in service of a massive welfare-regulatory state. Now, those who once were staunch defenders of personal liberty—particularly free...