RealClearMarkets Articles

U.S. Postal Service workers used to be able to afford Manhattan’s Upper East Side. When a young Lee Harvey Oswald moved with his mother Marguerite to New York City in 1952, they lived for a time with Marguerite’s postman son, Lee Harvey’s half-brother, on East 92nd Street. The oddity of a postman living where doctors, investment bankers and lawyers live now speaks to the so-called “affordability problem” that Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani ran on, but it more optimistically indicates the source of New York City’s lack of affordability: an enormous influx of...

As we approach the first quarter of 2026, gold is not just glimmering — it’s flashing an urgent signal to investors: diversify now, while momentum remains strong.  With multiple top-tier institutions projecting dramatic gains and global macro trends favoring safe-haven assets, now may be one of the best windows in decades to allocate to gold — and to consider expanding beyond traditional channels into alternative bullion investments. In recent weeks, several major banks and analysts have significantly upgraded their gold price forecasts. Deutsche Bank now expects gold...

Australia’s green energy experiment has left millions of its citizens with a shaky power grid, serving as a case study on how blind allegiance to climate dogma leads to economic and social turmoil.  The once sacred “net zero” pledge has been exposed as a curse producing public anger, stark warnings from industry and a rethinking of national energy policy. Cracks in the so-called consensus about human-caused global warming are widening. Last week, the National Party of Australia finally broke the spell. By unanimously voting to abandon a 2050 net zero target, party...

Investment professionals who work on Wall Street may be in need of grief counseling—or at least a hug and a strong drink—as they try to cope with the fallout from November’s New York City mayoral election. It is not just that self-proclaimed democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani will soon occupy the Mayor’s office; it is also that he appointed former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan to his transition team. Khan’s tenure at the FTC was marked by the abandonment of the “consumer welfare standard,” which judges a business's actions by...

In his recently released memoir, Born To Be Wired, John Malone writes of attending the 1979 Western Show out in Anaheim, CA. What the TCI CEO witnessed fascinated him, but also terrified him. It was a proliferation of television stations sprouting up to meet the needs of a still small, but growing cable TV subscriber base. Think ESPN, Nickelodeon, HBO, etc. Malone’s realization was that the cable companies with “scale” would be the winners in a still young industry. He immediately returned to Denver to figure out how to grow TCI even faster. Malone’s glimpse into the...

Social scientists tell us that men think about sex 99.9728% of the time. The remaining 0.0272% occurs immediately after sex, when their only thought is how quickly they can exit the scene. Women, on the other hand, live in a different universe entirely. Their minds juggle roughly 400 simultaneous thoughts—many unnecessary, most contradictory. “I wonder if I should wear my Lilly Pulitzer dress to the Thompsons’ July 4th party in 2029.” The eminent German social scientist Edison Von Megahertz once compared the female brain to a softball-sized knot of copper wire attached...

“The present increase in commerce is not to be attributed to ministers, or to any political contrivances, but to its own natural operations in consequence of peace.” The above insight is unoriginal; Thomas Paine felt it necessary to restate what should have been obvious to all—in 1792!  Centuries later, the fact that commerce is a natural consequence of peace seems even less obvious.  In the absence of conflict, voluntary exchange is as natural as breathing.  Suffocating is unnatural, and that is precisely what happens to people—“the...

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump pledged support for working Americans. This included a promise to end inflation, with specific assurances that grocery bills would fall and  energy prices would be halved. He promised no cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and protection for Medicaid. It further included a promise to protect jobs and reduce crime by stopping and/or deporting illegal immigrants, as well as to protect domestic jobs and pay down our debt with tariffs.  A quick look at the data tells us promises were...

“Bob and I had no idea of any of the potential back then.” Those are the words of cable television visionary John Malone in his recently released memoir, Born To Be Wired. Malone was writing about Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI) “hanging coaxial cable across the country” in the early 1970s to provide rural areas with better television reception, but it didn’t occur to him or TCI founder Bob Magness that decades later the cable would be “the platform for the likes of Amazon, Facebook, and Google, and unlocking immense value in a new digital...

As the 43rd Attorney General of Indiana, I spent years fighting the overreach of unelected bureaucrats who treat the American people like pawns in their endless game of regulation. Back in September 2024, I wrote about how Justice Neil Gorsuch nailed it in his book Over Ruled: We’ve drowned in a sea of rules so vast and obscure that ordinary folks get blindsided daily, paying the price for Washington’s unchecked appetite for control.  The Chevron doctrine was the crown jewel of that mess, handing federal agencies a blank check to interpret laws however...

Why doesn’t West Virginia have more debt? The question rates asking in response to a Wall Street Journal editorial which observes that California “is facing huge budget deficits despite an ebullient stock market and capital-gains rush.” The answer to the West Virginia question can be found in the Journal editorial’s observation. Explaining the California deficit and debt situation, the Journal editorial cites analysis from the state’s non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) that suggests it's an effect of “spending growth continuing to...

The December reading of 47.9 marks a solid 9% monthly gain. Consumer sentiment improved in December, as the RealClearMarkets/TIPP Economic Optimism Index, the first monthly read on U.S. consumer confidence, rose from 43.9 in November to 47.9, a robust 4.0 points or 9.1 percent gain. Still, the index stayed below the neutral 50 level for the fourth straight month, keeping the nation in what we classify as the pessimistic zone. December’s reading of 47.9 is 2.5 percent below the 299-month historical average of 49.1, which shows that confidence is strengthening but not fully...

The House Committee on Energy and Commerce on Tuesday will once again plunge into the deep waters of children’s online safety. At this hearing, many familiar pieces of legislation will return for consideration: the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), an app store age verification mandate, a bill to ban children from social media, the privacy reform known as COPPA 2.0, and much more. “Here’s the House plan to protect kids online,” reads the headline from Punchbowl News, which broke the news of the hearing. It seems, however, lawmakers’ grasp of the...

As both right- and left-leaning forms of socialism gain traction in pockets across America, we risk losing sight of the core principles that made it the most prosperous, innovative, and opportunity-rich nation on earth. Revisiting the insights of great economists is a timely reminder that capitalism remains the only system capable of converting human knowledge, ingenuity, and self-interest into improved living standards for all. Why Central Planning Cannot Compete with Free Markets In his famous essay The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945), Friedrich Hayek explained why socialism and...

Bad news for the IRS is good news for Americans. And recently, we learned that an IRS scheme to consolidate even more power over our taxes is no more. It was called Direct File, a program that allowed taxpayers to file their taxes directly with the IRS rather than through a third party like an accountant or TurboTax. It was a pilot program available to 30 million taxpayers across 25 states, and yet only 140,000 ended up using it.  In addition to the complexity and usability concerns cited in an Inspector General report, taxpayers were likely sensitive to the fact that using...

President Trump’s recent Truth Social warning about the rise of “Woke AI” echoes his prior executive order, Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government, which seeks to confront artificial intelligence systems trained or tuned to reflect ideological narratives rather than objective truth. And yet, even as that order takes aim at political bias and progressive orthodoxy in AI, it arguably leaves unnamed one of the most consequential mechanisms by which ideology enters algorithmic systems: the doctrine of “disparate impact.” “Woke AI,” according to...

Nearly every state now participates in major interstate compacts that let doctors and nurses practice across state lines, expanding the healthcare workforce and giving patients more options. Yet when it comes to advanced practice nurses—the clinicians who could most immediately fill the gap in primary care—fewer states have jumped on board. The nation is rapidly adopting streamlined licensing for physicians and nurses, but the Advanced Practice Registered Nurse (APRN) Compact remains stuck, and patients are paying the price. Only four states have joined the APRN Compact, with...

One of Russell Vought’s top regulatory policies upon taking the helm at OMB this year was, according to a former Trump administration official, the implementation of regulations that would reduce the number of Social Security disability benefits awarded to older individuals. Current regulations require Social Security to consider older age as a factor in making disability determinations. The Vought proposal sought to reverse that. Disability attorneys scored a major victory last week when they brought Vought’s proposal down. Jason Turkish, a disability...

“No matter your business, you cannot stay still for any length of time or your competitors will scratch and claw all over you.” That’s how Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank described life in the real, ruthless world of commerce. Please contemplate Blank’s dose of reality alongside all the pearl-clutching from the education-obsessed over a new study showing that one out of eight University of California, San Diego (UCSD) freshmen “have math skills ‘that fall below middle-school level.’” According to an editorial in the Wall Street Journal that...