RealClearMarkets Articles

On June 17, the White House cleared the final regulatory checkpoint for a Department of Homeland Security rule that would cap F-1 student visas at four years, shorten the post-graduation grace period from 60 days to 30, and replace 30 years of “duration of status” admission with discretionary federal review. Federal Register publication is imminent. The effective date will follow 60 days later — putting the rule on track for early fall. The press has framed it as a question about students. It is not. It is a question about whether the federal government should override one...

Vik Bajaj, the co-CEO of Jeff Bezos’s new venture Prometheus, said something recently in an interview with the New York Times, recently that deserves more attention than it got. Explaining why building something as complex as a jet engine is hard, he said: “You can’t build something like a jet engine with words alone, not even the words of mathematical equations.” That is a striking admission to come from inside a company raising tens of billions of dollars to apply AI to engineering. It is, in effect, an admission of AI limits. Reactions on Prometheus focused on the...

The California Billionaire Tax Act has qualified for the November 2026 ballot, promising a massive cash windfall for the state. Proponents confidently declare that it will yield around $100 billion. On paper the calculation seems a no-brainer. If you take the net worth of California’s billionaires from the Forbes list at the beginning of the year, roughly $2 trillion, and apply the proposed one-time 5 percent wealth tax, you land right around $100 billion.  However, while the arithmetic is straightforward, the economics are shaky. A foundational principle of economics is that...

The country’s economy has evolved in the last 50 years, but Washington’s retirement rules have not. It’s time we change that. For decades, working class Americans were told to invest their earnings and trust the markets. It’s a reality that has paid dividends for the more than 60% of Americans who own stocks either directly or through retirement accounts like 401(k)s and IRAs. But the fastest-growing sectors of the American economy remain largely inaccessible to ordinary retirement savers, a reality many policymakers still refuse to acknowledge.  That alone should...

Electricity is getting more expensive, and across much of the country the fastest-growing part of the bill is not the part most people would guess. It is not the cost of generating the power, but a separate charge, one your utility passes on to you, that pays power plants and other resources to promise they will be available years from now. The payment buys their presence on the hottest summer day or coldest winter night, when the grid is under the greatest strain. That promise has a price, and in one large region it has climbed to a level no one had seen before. A nonprofit grid operator...

In 1966, American psychologist Abraham Maslow opined that “it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” Washington fits snugly into that paradigm, tending to view government regulation as the default solution to every challenge. The result is the creation of new problems instead of remedying old ones.  The Jones Act, an obscure but problematic maritime law, offers a compelling example. Enacted more than a century ago, the rule requires goods transported between U.S. ports to travel on ships that are American-built,...

“If you’re ignorant, books won’t laugh at you.” Those are the words of Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962), and hopefully a spur to more humble approaches when it comes to “saving” education.   Education won’t be fixed in Washington, state legislatures, in school districts, or in think tanks. To suggest otherwise is to presume that activism, or laws in a book, can replace the individual desire to learn. In a recent post, long-time think tanker and energetic educational reformist Corey Deangelis told his flock that homeschooling is the historical norm,...

Somewhere along the way, America decided that a four-year degree was the only respectable answer to the question of what comes after high school. The plumber who just handed you a $250 bill to replace a faucet cartridge never got that message. He also doesn't have $50,000 in student loan debt. The joke, it turns out, was on the rest of us. America didn't stop needing tradesmen. It spent thirty years telling young people not to become one. Starting in the 1980s and accelerating hard through the 1990s and 2000s, schools measured themselves by college acceptance rates. Guidance counselors...

Donald Trump “took out over 85 percent of Iran’s defense industrial base; sank its navy; grounded its air force; damaged its centrifuges; and decimated its ballistic missile capabilities, conventional military forces and infrastructure of repression.” That’s AEI’s Marc Thiessen in the Washington Post. He was laying out some of the “13,000 differences” between what Barack Obama did in Iran relative to Trump. In listing the U.S. military’s quick (one week, two?) destruction of Iran’s military, Thiessen perhaps reminds readers not of the...

In a rare moment of bipartisan agreement, the House passed legislation this Spring to allow the year-round sale of E15. For those less familiar with ethanol policy, the change lifts longstanding restrictions (due to its higher volatility in warmer weather) that limit E15 sales during the summer months. Supporters, including corn growers and lawmakers, argue the move will strengthen domestic industry and lower costs for consumers. The evidence suggests otherwise.  E15 will not meaningfully address affordability concerns. A more comprehensive look at...

What do Iowa Senator Charles Grassley and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar have in common with Dr. Victor Frankenstein? Like Dr. Frankenstein, Senators Grassley and Klobuchar have created a monster that will not die. But unlike the two senators, Dr. Frankenstein never actively tried to revive his creation. The “monster” is the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), which the two senators have recently reintroduced. AICOA would terrorize leading American technology businesses, as well as workers and consumers. One of the scariest parts of the bill forbids big tech...

Small business government contractors haven’t had it easy for the last 16 months. DOGE, the longest shutdown in history, and other factors made getting and completing contracts harder than it’s been in decades. But as FY26 begins to close, things are looking up across the entire industry. Early FY2025 numbers show procurement up 6.5%, especially driven by key administration priorities across defense, IT, infrastructure, and healthcare. Parabilis, the company where I serve as Chief Financial Officer, is seeing clients report stronger proposal pipelines. And our Federal Market...

Peggy Noonan is asking if we can “Survive” the AI revolution?  Her skepticism about Silicon Valley has her predicting that a tendency to isolate will grow with AI, that “It will pull people away from each other, and into friendship with and dependence on itself.” Noonan’s prediction raises a seemingly unrelated question. Why are Apple shareholders so rich? What a dumb question. They own Apple shares. The answer is insufficient. How soon we forget how roundly dismissed the iPhone was ahead of launch in 2007. Remember Palm CEO Ed Colligan? “We've...

Public pension fund managers have run the same accounting maneuver for fifty years. It is entirely legal, widely practiced, and engineered to make a structural debt problem look like a funding gap. The logic is circular: decide what return you expect to earn, then use that number as the rate at which you discount what you owe. The higher the assumed return, the smaller the reported liability. The smaller the liability, the lower the required contribution. The lower the contribution, the more comfortable everyone in the room feels - until the bill arrives. That is where American public pension...

We’re told that artificial intelligence is so amazing that even the best and brightest among us can’t hold a candle to it, and with each passing day, it’s increasingly difficult to deny that claim.  AI-generated images beat what people display on canvas, and AI-generated songs top billboards.  AI turns spectators into surgeons and laymen into lawyers, but we’re also told that AI just isn’t intelligent enough to copy the quants.  Artificial intelligence isn’t fake enough to pick stocks?  Your author is more than a bit skeptical. AI and...

Wealth tax proposals are popping up across the country, sparking economic debates about tax fairness. The question centers on whether very wealthy individuals are paying their fair share. Some policymakers suggest that a tax on the entire net worth of those individuals’ assets, not their income, is the right way to address the issue. After decades working on tax policy in the Senate, I am convinced it is not.  Lawmakers in both chambers of Congress are pushing legislation to impose a new annual wealth tax on the country's billionaires. In California, a ballot initiative to do the...

The financial commentariat went into today’s economic-data dump looking for a reason to panic. The preferred storyline was obvious before the numbers even hit: inflation is back, the Fed is behind the curve, and rate hikes are coming.  That is not what the data say.  Today delivered a full suite of economic indicators: the Fed’s preferred PCE inflation gauge, the third estimate of first-quarter GDP, durable-goods orders, and weekly jobless claims. Taken together, they point to a much more disciplined conclusion. Inflation remains elevated, but the shock is still heavily...

Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour was a smashing success, but it in no way sparked domestic or global economic growth. Quite the opposite most likely. More on the Swift tour in a bit. For now, it’s useful to point out an obvious truth lost on the Keynesian economic religion: No act of saving ever subtracts from demand. All demand is an effect of production, so unless producers are literally stuffing the consumptive fruits of their work into coffee cans, their production is mirrored by consumption. This is worth remembering amid perhaps reasonable excitement about the World Cup. A recent...

Will artificial intelligence improve workers’ lives, or hand them the equivalent of a pink slip? It is one of the most pressing questions facing the U.S. economy, and polling shows that Americans are currently more anxious than excited about AI’s effect on work. Even among top economists, there is a sharp divergence of opinion: while there is broad consensus that AI will boost near-term productivity, experts are heavily split on whether the technology will ultimately eliminate more jobs than it adds. The prevailing narrative focuses heavily on cognitive displacement, warning that...