RealClearMarkets Articles

“You don’t want to send your son there because he’ll become a communist, he’ll become a drug addict.” That’s the modern consensus about elite colleges and universities, so why pay for modern education? Except that the quote that begins this piece is from the 1960s. It was a parent telling another parent to not send their child to UCLA. Which is telling. It’s a reminder that complaints about what they’re teaching college kids today are decades old, and realistically centuries. For as long as there have been universities, there have been parents...

A tip is a gift, but it has somehow come to be regarded as mandatory.  But gifts aren’t mandatory.  Tipping someone is an expression of gratitude for service valued above expectations, and because two patrons at the same table will likely value differently the service received, the notion of tipping minimums vandalizes reason.  No one deserves anything, especially those working in the service industry, which is the point: the better the service, the larger the tips because generosity is earned, not guaranteed.  Your author is aware that restaurant owners in most...

Cable television visionary John Malone could have owned a substantial portion of AOL before it was AOL. Where it perhaps becomes more ironic is that it was Malone’s TCI that was laying the cable throughout the U.S. in the 1970s that set the stage for broad internet access decades later. Said another way, over twenty years before the internet was even a thing, Malone was unwittingly building the infrastructure for its mass rollout. Malone’s seminal role in creating the backbone for what would eventually enable the rise of a transformative technology rates thought right now as...

The debate over how far to cut interest rates while inflation remains above target has pushed inflation measurement back to the center of monetary policy. What once seemed like a technical concern has become central to the policy debate, as policymakers, markets, and politicians argue over whether the data themselves justify easing—or whether easing is being justified by adjusting for known measurement lags. That scrutiny has intensified amid heightened political pressure on the Federal Reserve, including public attacks on its leadership and ongoing scrutiny of its decisions, alongside...

As Congress prepares to return from its winter recess, negotiations over another round of legislation to regulate the crypto industry are heating up. Whether Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee can reach an agreement remains an open question. That is unfortunate, because among the issues that still need to be addressed, one of particular importance is the impact of crypto on lending to underserved communities. Rural areas, inner cities, and economically disadvantaged communities rely heavily on community banks, typically defined as those with less than $1 billion in...

On Monday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell delivered a stark warning.  Responding to the Justice Department’s subpoena and threat of charges, Powell said the move was a pretext: an attempt to pressure the central bank into setting interest rates according to political demands rather than economic evidence. He framed it as an unprecedented attack on Federal Reserve independence and vowed to continue doing his job “without fear or favor.” Powell is right about the dangers of politicizing economics. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: the Federal Reserve is far...

Netflix appears poised to acquire Warner Brothers despite a hostile takeover bid from Paramount Pictures. However, the deal still must be approved by the government. Hopefully, Justice Department Antitrust head Gail Slater will not only approve the deal—but use the opportunity to reaffirm that the 1948 consent decree stemming from the case of U.S. v Paramount 334 U.S. 131 (1948) is invalid. U.S. v. Paramount was a case brought against five major movie studios: Paramount, Fox, RKO, MGM, and Warner Brothers. The government alleged that the studios’ ownership of movie theaters...

Affordability has become the defining economic issue of the moment. Headline inflation hovers around 3 percent year-over-year, yet prices for essential categories such as housing and rent continue to rise faster than wages. Mortgage costs for homeowners have surpassed $2,000, and rents have climbed to nearly $1,500. Home prices remain far above pre-pandemic levels, up 80 percent since 2017. Vehicles are increasingly expensive: the average new car now costs about $50,000. The total U.S. household debt to finance it all has swelled to...

There are already flying taxis in China. There’s drone delivery of meals too. About the leaps taking place in China, some will say we need to catch up. Others will say that in addition to catching up, we need to keep advances hatched in China out of the U.S. They would be incorrect, twice.   It can’t be said enough that trade isn’t war, it's mutual enhancement. That’s why we do it. Which means the answer to some and realistically all of the striking advances in China is to remove U.S. barriers to them. The barriers don’t improve us, rather they set us back....

Credit markets have transformed America, allowing countless businesses and families to finance their futures. Nearly 80 percent of Americans own a credit card, and an astounding 94 percent of these consumers value the convenience of ready access to funds. Economist Steve Moore said it best: “access to credit has been almost fully democratized. Everyone is using them.” President Trump’s unfortunate new proposal to cap interest rates threatens to disrupt that convenient capital. On January 9, the President posted on Truth Social that he is “calling...

Leave Nancy Pelosi alone. Or at the very least, leave Pelosi alone to trade stocks. To muzzle her apparent skill when it comes to picking stocks is to blind the rest of us to crucial information. No doubt a few heads have already exploded. Doesn’t this guy know that Pelosi isn’t really an investor? As opposed to picking stocks based on a keen sense of what’s ahead, Pelosi is using her high perch in Congress to inform her trades. Since what Congress does in a spending, taxing and regulatory sense can have such a huge impact on what happens in the economy, Pelosi knows in...

One of Joe Biden’s biggest fibs received the least amount of attention. Back when he was president, and amid notably high gasoline prices, Biden talked of how when he was young, the price at the pump affected what the Biden family could have for dinner. It was great politics, but for one problem: what Biden described never happened. If anyone doubts this, they need only Google “oil price history,” and look at how flat the price of crude was right up to 1971, a year when Biden was well out of childhood. It was in 1971 that President Nixon floated the U.S. dollar. Subsequent...

When shareholders ask a simple question about how their money is being spent, the answer should be transparency. When the answer is evasion, it raises a troubling question: What is the company hiding? This proxy season, the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) submitted a straightforward proposal to Berkshire Hathaway. NCPPR requested a report assessing whether the company’s subsidiaries’ sustainability commitments are actually justified by expected-value and return-on-investment (ROI) analysis. The request is fundamental to the concept of ownership. For...

The top 400 American taxpayers pay more in federal taxes than the bottom 70 percent of U.S. taxpayers combined. The previous truth is a friendly reply to Cliff Asness and Michael Mendelson’s recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece in which they critiqued Mitt Romney’s surely misguided call to tax rich people like him more. In Asness’s inimitably entertaining style, the two helpfully took apart Romney’s thinking without making it personal. It was in their conclusion that Asness and Mendelson arguably faltered. They wrote, “Mr. Romney, please write an essay...

No government should pressure a bank to cut off customers innocent of any wrongdoing. Yet that is what happened with Operation Choke Point under the Obama administration and that is what happened again with “Operation Choke Point 2.0” under the Biden administration. Even today, countless customers are debanked because the laws and regulations in place have made banks too cautious. It’s time to bring governmental debanking to an end. Governmental debanking can occur in many forms. It could be the result of something as formal as a court order or as casual as a comment from a...

Investor confidence weakened by 9% in January, while overall optimism slipped 1.5%. Consumer sentiment edged down in January, as the RealClearMarkets/TIPP Economic Optimism Index, the first monthly read on U.S. consumer confidence, slipped from 47.9 in December to 47.2, a 0.7-point or 1.5 percent loss. The index stayed below the neutral 50 level for the fifth straight month, keeping the nation in what we classify as the pessimistic zone. January’s reading of 47.2 is 3.9% below the 300-month historical average of 49.1, indicating that confidence remains subdued and not yet fully...

Congressional Democrats keep saying they are focusing on the affordability crisis, promising that they will soon come up with an agenda to lower costs for working people. What they won’t tell you is that their real affordability agenda centers around one policy priority—-increasing taxes on the American people to fund new spending programs, and they are already working on their tax increase plans.A new paper by a leading Democratic economic adviser and strategist spells out in detail how their plans to address the cost of living will “require raising taxes on a far larger...

Housing debates often get lost in abstractions about “affordability” or arguments over subsidies. But mortgage rates are not set by rhetoric, press releases, or political messaging. They are set in bond markets—specifically, in the market for mortgage-backed securities (MBS).  That distinction matters, because it determines whether policy actions affect housing finance through durable market mechanisms or short-lived political optics.  That is why President Trump’s decision to direct Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to deploy roughly $200 billion into the MBS...

They thought Elon Musk was retarded. That’s what Walter Isaacson reports in his biography of Musk about the teachers at Musk’s elementary school. Musk’s response to Isaacson was “I wasn’t really going to put an effort into things I thought were meaningless.” From Musk’s reply readers can hopefully see true hope for education. Opposite members of the right, it won’t be fixed with more government (educational vouchers, tuition tax credits), nor will it be fixed if the left gets its way and more resources are directed to teachers and...