RealClearMarkets Articles

Medicine is expensive and only seems to get more so every year. But this doesn’t have to be inevitable. The reason patients pay so much is an insurance industry that no longer functions like insurance. Instead of handling catastrophic and unexpected problems, health insurance is the go-to solution for routine healthcare, including predictable pharmaceutical needs. This has disconnected patients from the prices of their medicines and allowed Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) to profit from drug discounts intended for patients. The result has been higher drug prices as cheaper...

If corporate leaders dress up ideological expenditures as profitable investments, without vetting them against projected cash flows and opportunity costs, they are not merely misallocating capital but misleading stakeholders and courting legal liability. The fundamental obligation of a corporate fiduciary is unambiguous: to make business decisions on a fully informed basis in order to maximize shareholder value. While this duty has long been the bedrock of corporate governance, the rapid expansion of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing—growing to more than $16...

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.Secretary of Health and Human ServicesU.S. Department of Health and Human Services200 Independence Avenue, SWWashington, DC 20201 Dear Mr. Kennedy: I’d like to thank you for something you did for me. It’s something you once said that has stuck with me and has risen to a new personal epiphany based on recent events. But before I explain what you said and what followed, some background. We likely come from two different political worlds. I’m not Irish, nor Catholic. I am the opposite of a big-government liberal. The best government is the government that...

It was 1994, and the Republicans had just taken control of the House of Representatives. After the change Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane received a call from Fannie Mae, one in which he was told of a pending donation from the public/private mortgage giant. Crane knew the why behind the contribution: it reflected Fannie Mae’s desire to play to the other side in the new Washington. He refused the donation. Cato didn't nor does it take contributions from governmental entities.  It's useful to bring up what Crane did as a way of perhaps understanding the troubles the...

“We are all faced with a series of great opportunities—brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.”  - John W. Gardner Rich people are the most important buyers in the world. That’s why it’s unfortunate that President Trump is actively leaning on U.S. pharmaceutical corporations to lower drug prices. What a shame, most of all for the poorest Americans. The clue for why can be found in this opinion piece’s opening sentence. It’s all about the rich. As the rare buyers for whom price is an afterthought, they take the risks with obscure and...

Working recently in a manufacturing facility outside of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, Chandra Das entered a debate at the factory’s inspection table. Das, a Hindu, apparently made a negative comment with religious overtones. They were seemingly his last words. As New York Times reporters Saif Hasnat and Mujib Mashal described it, Das’s co-workers “accused him of blasphemy and dragged him out into the street. As rumors spread that Mr. Das had said something disparaging of Islam’s prophet Mohammed, an angry mob grew. They lynched him, tied his body to a tree and set...

The fraudulent number that is Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a substantially shrunken number relative to the true size of the U.S. economy. See the “surge” in GDP reported yesterday for evidence. The U.S. economy is always growing precisely due to the people in the United States, and their prosperity is most certainly much greater than what GDP indicates. To see why, just contemplate what factored large in the 4.3% increase. Exports rose 8.8% while imports of goods fell at a 4.7% rate. While an economy as thoroughly dynamic as the U.S.’s shouldn’t be measured in the...

The cannons roared. The soldiers charged. Hurrah! The soldiers died. We threw dirt clods at one another; pinecones were hand grenades. We pretended they were the Germans, and they pretended we were the Germans . Most of our fathers had been in either “the war” or Korea. Confederate memorials were everywhere—every courthouse, every church—and on our farm there were several rows of dead men from the 9th Virginia Cavalry. We all knew where the battles were, which relatives had fought in them, and which of our houses the Yankees had burned. Some were torched by Cornwallis,...

Elon Musk is proving that Wicked’s Elphaba (aka the Wicked Witch of the West) was right: no good deed goes unpunished. Musk’s good deed was purchasing Twitter, which he renamed X, in order to restore the site to its origins as the internet’s leading free speech zone. Musk’s punishment for his good deed is a $140 million fine on X—imposed by European Union (EU) bureaucrats—for violating the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). X is subjected to the DSA’s strictest regulations because it is a “Very Large...

Every Christmas season, I have composed a “review and outlook” for the economy set to the rhythm and meter of Clement Moore’s classic, “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” In this year’s rendition – the 42nd – “St. Nick” makes his annual appearance, sharing his perspectives on yet another momentous year as well as hopeful outlook for the year ahead. ’Twas the Night Before Christmas             An Economic Review and...

No one just chooses to borrow money. What an obnoxious conceit, one that imagines lenders are blithe about those loaned to. More realistically, those with title to money decide who can and cannot borrow. And they’re very strict. Individuals with credit cards know this well. We don’t choose how much debt to run up, rather we’re told how much we can. Businesses similarly don't choose their level of debt, it's chosen for them. Established ones sometimes have “credit lines” at banks, and even bigger institutions go into the markets to borrow or raise much bigger...

Late last month, Australia passed a new law forcing streaming platforms to bankroll local content just to stay in business. And they’re not alone—Brazil, Canada, and the European Union are all following suit with similar rules. Disguised as support for domestic entertainment industries, these mandates are really a global shakedown of predominantly American streaming services, making them foot the bill for content worldwide. If more countries keep copying this playbook, the real losers won’t be Hollywood—they’ll be everyday viewers, who face higher costs...

As the nation’s only research center of its kind focused on the performance and competitiveness of middle market companies, the National Center for the Middle Market (NCMM) tracks issues related to growth including access to capital, private equity investment, and working capital management. Recently, we completed a study on private equity and private credit in the middle market in collaboration with Future Standard, a global asset management firm based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Based on the survey findings of 400 middle market leaders, private credit has become an increasingly...

With the recent stroke of a pen, President Trump took what could be one of the most consequential steps toward returning Corporate America to its investors: the American people. For years, foreign-owned proxy advisors ISS and Glass Lewis—together controlling more than 90 percent of the market— have exercised near total dominance over the proxy advisory industry. That dominance has been used to weaponize the retirement savings of ordinary Americans. By leveraging their outsized influence over shareholder voting, ISS and Glass Lewis have pressured companies to adopt...

She hasn’t yet completed her Ph.D., but mental health clinician Karen Paul, founder and CEO of Lily Health AI, is already making strides toward expanding access to and destigmatizing mental health support in the United States, particularly for immigrant and underserved communities  that are often excluded from traditional systems of care. Paul’s interest in psychology was shaped by her lived experiences and by observing the mental health struggles of family members and community members within South Asian immigrant contexts, where mental health concerns are often unspoken,...

The Man of Steel may soon have a new home. Netflix, which began as a DVD-by-mail rental service and is now the world’s leading streaming site, is seeking to acquire Warner Brothers studios. The merger will give Netflix access to Warner Brother’s film library and other properties—including DC Comics. This will enable Netflix to expand its offerings to include classic movies like Casablanca, Blazing Saddles, and The Exorcist—as well as franchises like Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings (and did I mention Superman?) The deal would thus enable Netflix to...

In 2022, Mexico’s politicians banned vaping products, hailing it as a public health victory. In practice, it did the opposite — pushing millions into an unregulated black market now controlled by powerful cartels. By outlawing a less harmful alternative to traditional cigarettes, the government handed criminals a new revenue stream and empowered corrupt police to extort citizens. Worse still, Mexico’s consumers are now inhaling liquids of unknown origin, erasing the health gains seen globally when smokers switch to safer alternatives. Vaping has become big business...

Patricia Andrews Fearon and Friedrich M. Götz from Stanford University and the University of Cambridge have published an important article entitled “The Zero-Sum Mindset”, in which they present the results of nine studies spanning six countries with 10,000 participants. They define a zero-sum mindset as a mental conception of success in which another person’s success automatically comes at your expense, and your failure is their success. Such situations do exist in life – a tennis match is one example: if you want to win, the other person must lose. However, there...

Bill Dally dropped out of high school. Something about history class. He didn’t want to sit through it. Dally subsequently went to work as an auto mechanic, though high test scores eventually secured him admission to Virginia Tech despite him having not received a high school diploma. A master’s degree from Stanford followed, and after that a PhD from CalTech. A tenured professor at MIT by his early thirties, Dally is now Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President of Research at Nvidia. Dally’s career path amid yet another periodic convulsion on the American right about...