RealClearMarkets Articles

Data centers will do more to enhance global peace than any weapon, treaty, or statesman could ever hope to. A walk of even a tiny portion of one would confirm the previous truth to even the most hardened of skeptics. Take Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan. Her optimism about Artificial Intelligence (AI) is tempered by deep pessimism. As she’s written, AI will “cure cancer and blow up the world.” A tour of a data center might cause Noonan to rethink her pessimism. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Leonard Read (1898-1983) famously observed that no man...

Even before the votes are counted in the midterm elections, Democrats are rolling out their tax increase plans for next year.  Two former Biden Treasury officials have released a paper detailing $15 trillion in tax increases, calling them substantial opportunities for raising revenue.The size and scope of their tax increases is breathtaking and unprecedented.  They argue large tax increases are needed to address the fiscal situation, while insisting that current spending cannot be reduced and instead needs to be increased.Their plans are not limited to just raising taxes on the...

For the last three years, junk stocks beat quality stocks by the widest margin ever. From November 2023 through June 2026, a portfolio that owned America’s highest-quality businesses and sold short its lowest-quality businesses lost 36%. That’s the worst stretch ever for quality stocks versus junk stocks. The opposite normally occurs. Hedge funds make money buying great companies (quality) and selling weak ones (junk). But during rare periods, the market’s discounting mechanism breaks down and, for a little while at least, junk beats quality. When this happens in conjunction...

Two titans in sports media, Barstool Sports’ founder Dave Portnoy and OutKick founder Clay Travis, had a very public October 8 spat on X over prediction markets and whether using them to trade on the outcome of sporting events is substantively different from betting on games through traditional sports books. Travis argues they’re not different and expresses his support for the Seminole Tribe’s lawsuit alleging that prediction markets are offering illegal gambling in Florida (the Seminole Tribe owns Hard Rock, Florida’s exclusive sports betting operator). Meanwhile,...

What happens if you tax the "rich"?  Let us start answering these questions first, then get to the larger picture and the issue of "luck." The tax code evaluates people's income whether from employment or investments.  If these are above a certain amount, the code and the new laws classify them as "rich" and subject them to higher taxes. Imagine workaholics, entrepreneurs, pouring back their incomes into businesses, or start-ups, only to invest the rest in other assets. What happens if governments tax away a large fraction of his income?  This person will save and invest...

On February 14, 2011, Uber sold 20% of itself to Benchmark Capital for $11 million. Uber is presently worth $136 billion, yet it handed over 20 percent of itself for $11 million? Why didn’t its executives borrow the money? In the question readers can hopefully find the answer. There was no interest rate high enough to compensate lenders for a $100,000 loan to Uber in 2011, let alone $11 million. Since its future was the definition of uncertain, its only source of cash was equity the eventual cost of which can now be measured in billions. Uber presently has $14 billion worth of debt. Now...

Developments in Milwaukee, Paris and Berlin point to a new opportunity for the United States and Europe to address anti-competitive market distortions (ACMDs) and establish a new agenda for economic prosperity. At the G20 meetings in Milwaukee, the Global Forum on Steel Excess Capacity agreed on coordinated action against the government interventions sustaining uneconomic production capacity. An October 7 statement, signed by 15 economies following the Milwaukee discussions, extended cooperation to sectors including electric vehicles, batteries and foundational semiconductors. Meanwhile, the...

Ask most Americans what worries them about the economy, and "the debt" lands near the top of the list. Television commentators often add a second fear: that America is in hock to China, which supposedly bankrolls Washington's deficits. Both reactions treat debt as a villain. Both skip the details, and with debt, the devil is always in the details. The China myth, turned upside down China's holdings of U.S. Treasury securities fell to about $633 billion in June 2026, the lowest level in nearly 18 years. That is less than 7 percent of the Treasuries held abroad, and Japan and Britain each hold...

A change of power in Washington reaches far beyond the Capitol. For Mexican workers, American businesses, and families on both sides of our shared border, the consequences of the November midterms could be felt in factories, on farms, and in communities struggling with economic uncertainty and insecurity. If Democrats win control of Congress, the question is whether Washington will use the next two years to solve shared problems or allow partisan conflict to make them harder to solve. Let me be clear about where I stand. I am neither a Republican nor a Democrat, and I cannot vote in American...

Did you ever wonder what's with those little stickers that come affixed to each and every apple, banana and other fruit now sold? Who mandated this? I thought for sure this has the earmarking of some government bureaucrats with more time on their hands than they should have. After all, think of how many extra make-work jobs these could create. Unemployment would be a thing of the past. Putting them on bananas was not so bad; you threw out the banana skin along with the tiny sticker. But they are a nightmare with apples; they take valuable time to peel off and, often, you lose a bit of the...

My first job after college, in 1984, taught me to ask a question about foreign aid that I am still asking forty-two years later: Who really benefits? I was a young MBA working for Bangladesh's Master Plan Organisation (MPO), which was preparing a twenty-year national water plan. The project was undertaken with assistance from the United Nations Development Programme and the World Bank, with Harza Engineering Company International among the principal consultants. MPO was an attractive employer for young Bangladeshi professionals. I earned about 5,000 taka monthly when, as I recall, a newly...

Curo Churata stopped at Home Depot ahead of going to work on June 27th. The decision proved fatal.  Such is life for illegal immigrants nowadays. Since work is presently criminalized for those not “invited” or “approved” by the central planners who’ve arrogated to themselves the power to choose human capital, market signals must be handled in the shadows as it were. Which on its own is a rejection of the two most popular arguments against immigrants: they’re coming here for welfare, and supposedly worse, they’re importing alien cultures that will...

Lafayette, We Are Here! High-trust societies produce a lot of innocent saps. Devoid of reality. Do-gooders and feel-gooders, but not many Andrew Jacksons. Bold men of action. In August 1914, the German army under Kaiser Wilhelm II invaded France, uninvited! Some 1.6 million German soldiers were initially mobilized. Over the course of the war, 11 million Germans were in the fight. The French fought ferociously, such that the Germans never held more than 3.7% of French territory. In defending their borders, the French lost nearly 1.4 million men killed in battle. Over the past two to three...

How far should we trust the investment reports that pour out every single day? Both the analysts who write research reports and the investors who read them navigate a relationship built on trust. It is an intellectual process designed to capture market value with objective truth at its center. Yet the time has come to re-examine this long-standing dynamic. This is not to say the past was entirely flawed; rather, it is time to restore the integrity of an information ecosystem that has gradually become diluted. The fundamental issue facing investors is not whether a report contains false...

History books will exonerate Joe Biden for so-called “Bidenflation.” And that’s not a defense of Biden. Instead, it’s a defense of the meaning of inflation. For background, we turn to the Cato Institute’s Ryan Bourne at the Washington Post. In a review of Isabella Weber’s Anti-Fascist Economics, Bourne rightly critiques Weber’s assertion that producers, responding to higher prices born of the coronavirus lockdowns (among other things), gave businesses “the ‘perfect opportunity’ to raise prices beyond their now-higher...

When the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) opened its annual convention in Chicago last week, MBA President Bob Broeksmit spent part of his remarks on one of the few recent policy changes that has actually lowered the cost of getting a mortgage. “Now that you finally have a choice, you can lower costs for borrowers,” he told the room, hailing the arrival of VantageScore 4.0 in mortgage credit scoring. This scoring method opens the path for new would-be homeowners by offering another way to assess their creditworthiness. Affordability, at least through the lens of public opinion,...

Yesterday, Wedgewood Polls admitted on X that their polling data was fake, calling it a "social experiment" and “far too easy”.  This is not some random pollster. They were consistently cited in major media outlets.  This is a good reminder of how manipulable polls are and how they can influence public perception.   It also shows that, while not perfect, a market-based mechanism to predict and get informed about elections is critically important today.  Markets Are a Tax On Bad Information Unlike all other forms of information, markets provide a...

What if Elizabeth Holmes was Eric Holmes? And what if Eric Holmes had raised $15 million for Theranos instead of the $700 million+ that Elizabeth Holmes reportedly raised? About the question, it’s not one rooted in feminism. It’s instead a comment that female heads of Silicon Valley start-ups are rare. So are females rare at venture capital firms. As Sebastian Mallaby reported in his 2022 book The Power Law, a history of the venture capital industry, by the end of the 1990s women “accounted for only 9 percent of new recruits at venture partnerships.”  It’s...

Small businesses have found the most success growing bigger by embracing the digital domain to reach and benefit consumers. According to the consultancy Deloitte, “Small businesses with less than 250 employees can access new markets and target new customers at a relatively affordable cost using digital tools.” Deloitte found that small businesses making extensive use of digital tools earn twice the revenue per employee and grow revenue four times as much annually compared to their less digitally attuned counterparts. This has been especially true with the rise of artificial...