RealClearMarkets Articles

This summer, soccer fans from around the world will pour into SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. In New York, they can catch a Mets game at Citi Field. In Charlotte, they can watch the Carolina Panthers at Bank of America Stadium. But here is one thing they cannot do: avoid Live Nation or Ticketmaster’s fees by walking into a local bank branch, opening a banking app, and buying tickets there instead. That oddity reflects a little-known legal wall, rooted in the Great Depression, that bars banks from offering many nonbanking goods and services, including tickets, travel services, and...

Notwithstanding the thunderous self-applause from Donald Trump about the gasoline purportedly being sold for $3.479 at twenty-five “Freedom Fuel” retailers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, at a time when the national average price is about $3.88, one truth remains eternal: There are no free lunches. The White House claims “The administration is not involved in the company, nor has the administration given the company any funding. There is no other entity or person subsidizing the lower gasoline costs. [The retailers] are simply reducing their...

Writing here, Peter Navarro warns us of a “Great Transshipment Scam” and its web of foreign staging grounds and back doors through which sly exporters sneak their goods into America under a false flag.  He wants customs scrutiny, penalties, and tightly enforced rules of origin to catch these ne’er-do-wells.  He describes an unenforced tariff as a “tollbooth with no collector.” There’s a problem with his story. The culprits he’s after are, overwhelmingly, Americans. Imagine a small manufacturer in the midwest, employing a few dozen American...

Most of the news I read about academia is negative. According to many commentators, costs have spiraled past the point of reason, public confidence has cratered, and a demographic cliff combined with immigration restrictions threatens to close many colleges and universities in the coming years. You probably read the same sort of thing. Since many of these concerns about the future of higher ed are serious, it is interesting to observe the industry, initially via its commanding heights, respond to incentives by turning back the clock. Before we talk solutions, let’s look at the problems....

For nineteen days this June, the United States conducted an unintended experiment in the economics of technology restriction, and the results should trouble anyone who assumes that cutting off access to a capability reliably denies it to an adversary. On 12 June, the Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to bar every foreign national from its two most capable AI models. Because nationality cannot be checked inside shared cloud infrastructure, the company shut both models down worldwide. The order was lifted on 30 June. The episode is being litigated as a national-security story, but its...

Self-Checkout lanes are under attack. Lawmakers in several states are pushing fines and staffing mandates to limit their use, arguing the machines cost jobs and enable theft. But the debate misses the real question: should politicians decide how private businesses operate, or should retailers and consumers decide for themselves whether self-checkout is worth it? The answer should be obvious. Installing self-checkout is a business judgement, not a policy question. Retailers invest in the technology because they believe the savings, lower labor costs, faster checkout, happier customers,...

Conservatives rightly mock the left for its endless alarmism about “global warming.” Whether the latter is a threat or not, the very notion that we humans can mitigate the warming power of a sun that a million planet earths could fit inside seems more than a stretch. Sadly, conservatives have their thumbsucking qualities too. Think their weird obsession with birth rates. Endlessly invested in notions of decline allegedly foretold by a failure of parents to have enough babies, they attach apocalyptic nonsense to individual choice. Lyman Stone, director of the Pronatalism Initiative...

In 1948 South Korea had per capita income of $48, a level of earnings that placed its economics below those of sub-Saharan African countries. At the time one U.S. official concluded that “Korea can never attain a high standard of living.” The reason, he observed, was that “there are virtually no Koreans with the technical training and experience required to take advantage of Korea’s resources and effect an improvement over its rice-economy status.” The present is always a lousy predictor of the future. Except there’s more. The rise of South Korea from a...

“Don’t count on it.” That’s what Joanne Lipman recently wrote at the New York Times, in a piece titled “The Elusive Promise of the Four-Day Workweek.” Lipman’s pessimism about the four-day workweek becoming the norm is ironically informed by studies that reveal the four-day workweek as “superior.” They show productivity resembling the five-day workweek, albeit over four days. Lipman notes that "employee satisfaction [has] soared" where the four-day workweek has been implemented.  Ok, so why the alleged elusiveness and Lipman's...

Have you ever accidentally put your hand on a hot stove? The reaction is immediate. You pull it away because the pain tells you something important. You have learned a lesson, and chances are you will never make the same mistake again. Most reasonable people learn from experience because repeating the same mistake only leads to the same painful result. That common sense principle should apply to economics just as much as it applies to everyday life. However, time after time, policymakers embrace economic ideas that have already failed, convinced that the outcome will somehow be different....

Much of college education is a complete scam. A joke. A terrible fraud and an immense money-laundering operation that guilts parents and taxpayers into distributing vast amounts of wealth to a bunch of entitled elitists. They have your number. You have been snookered because the "educrat" mafia has convinced you, as a parent and taxpayer, that your child will be a failure unless he or she goes to college, the type of college that only they administer and control. The frumpy professional classes who live off the largess of the state, but have never run a business or have any idea how to do so,...

AltaMed Health Services reported $1.72 billion in revenue in 2024, which is more than many publicly traded healthcare companies. Yet unlike a public corporation, the nonprofit entity answers to no shareholders, enjoys broad tax exemptions, and derives much of its revenue from taxpayer-supported healthcare programs. AltaMed also reported $1.66 billion in assets and its revenues exceeded expenses by $68.4 million. It operates more than 70 clinics, employs roughly 5,000 people, and serves more than 700,000 patients throughout Southern California, making it one of the nation’s largest...

If education is so important to the development and future prosperity of young people, why doesn’t the latter reflect in compensation for teachers? It’s a question worth asking as conservatives continue to promote an education crisis narrative. Better yet, if American education is so bad, why isn’t this reflected in the migration of financial, physical, and most of all, human capital, out of the U.S.? Consider an otherwise optimistic editorial at the Wall Street Journal about the U.S. on its 250th.  Amid the optimism, the members of the editorial board listed a few...

“Are you guys fucking serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.” This message was sent by Rob Flaherty, who at the time was Deputy Assistant to President Joe Biden, to an employee of Facebook after his “request” to remove a post criticizing the Administration’s COVID policies was ignored. Flaherty was not the only Biden official to pressure Facebook and other social media companies to remove posts challenging the official position on COVID and other matters. For example, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy suggested dealing with COVID-19...

On May 20, the attorneys general of Texas, Nebraska, Iowa and West Virginia sued Institutional Shareholder Services in four separate state courts, accusing the world's most influential proxy advisory firm of doing exactly what it promised clients it would not do: substitute an ESG agenda for financial judgment. Florida had already sued ISS and its rival Glass Lewis in November. The suits rely on state consumer-protection law, not ERISA. But they document the exact conduct federal law was written to prevent, and that's the argument worth making. Section 404(a)(1) of...

Citigroup announced a new platform for tokenized shares of private companies last week, describing it as a blockchain innovation. It may prove more significant as a challenge to one of finance's oldest assumptions. For more than a century, companies accepted transparency because they needed liquidity. If founders, employees and early investors sought a reliable way to convert ownership into cash, they accepted disclosure requirements, regulatory oversight and scrutiny that came with public ownership. Public markets were built on a simple reality:...

Data centers, and the $1 trillion+ that is being invested in their creation, are “causing” overall weakness in the U.S. economy. That’s according to former Biden White House economic official, Jennifer Harris. Writing in the New York Times, Harris asserts that “the artificial intelligence buildout is expected to rival or surpass previous technological booms at their peaks — rail, electrification and the internet revolution.” This is bullish, right? Not according to Harris. She laments that AI “is vacuuming up so much of our land, talent, semiconductor...

New Jersey's teachers' pension fund has less than 46 cents set aside for every dollar it owes retired teachers, and its liabilities grow by roughly $2 billion a year no matter what the state contributes, according to the state's own actuarial valuation as of July 1, 2024. Governor Mikie Sherrill's response, in the FY2027 budget she signed on June 30, was to fully fund the pension system at $7.3 billion — 12% of a record $60.7 billion spending plan — while leaving every structural driver of the shortfall untouched. That's not a recovery plan. That's a...

The recent oil-price plunge again reminds us that markets are smarter than experts.  It’s not that markets are never wrong; however, when they are, they correct themselves.  In contrast when experts are wrong, they can stay wrong for an extended period—and ironically, continue to remain “experts.” An Investopedia story in March captured the prevailing wisdom of experts in the U.S.-Iran conflict’s early days: Market watchers are increasingly pessimistic about a swift return to normal for oil markets…”  The New...