RealClearMarkets Articles

Political pundits and politicians have spent days analyzing the 2026 midterms from every angle. But the real lesson is a simple principle that Vice President JD Vance already laid out: The Trump administration was punished for violating important promises to key stakeholders, especially on affordability and the war in Iran. Here’s what the midterms can teach CEOs about making, and keeping, promises so they don’t end up with stakeholders “voting” against them. Broken promises, broken leadership President Donald Trump was elected with one of the most diverse electorates...

Traditional gasoline-powered five-passenger sedans, once the mainstay of auto sales in the United States, are experiencing a sales resurgence. According to industry sales figures and as reported by Car and Driver, sedans – cars, not SUVs, crossovers, or trucks – from Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mazda, and Toyota are all posting higher sales for 2026. And, the increases are not small. Honda’s Accord and Toyota’s Camry, which historically competed to be America’s best-selling car, have seen sales increase by 33 percent and 11 percent, respectively. Not to be left behind,...

Many charter members of our nation’s core of blow-dried and blathering commentators are blaming last week's blue tsunami in the midterm elections on a supposedly bad Trump economy. Voters are entitled to their frustrations over high prices. But the data continue to tell a very different story about the underlying strength of Trumpnomics.  Exhibit A: Friday's blowout October jobs report. Employers created 165,000 jobs against Wall Street's expectation of just 65,000—more than two and a half times the forecast. Unemployment fell from 4.2 percent to 4.1 percent even as...

A business can shop around for a better shipping rate. It cannot do much about a federal law that makes the ship it needs off-limits. That is the problem with the Jones Act. The current waiver gives President Donald Trump a chance to show what happens when businesses have more shipping options—and enough time to put them to use. Trump should work with Congress to suspend the law for a full two years. Enacted in 1920, the Jones Act restricts the ships that can carry goods between American ports. Those vessels generally must be American-built, American-owned, American-flagged, and...

Visiting Berlin in 1983, its Wall was a stunning sight. All that effort, all that threatened violence, just to keep people from choosing to improve their lives. We tut-tutted about how sad it was for a government to make its population prisoners. And yet, here we are in America building a new Berlin Wall around our banks to keep depositors from choosing to move their funds. In 2025, Congress passed the Genius Act, which prohibits interest payments by stablecoins, thereby preventing them from competing with the pittance of interest depositors receive from banks. The Genius Act was bipartisan...

Fathers are becoming better and nicer by the day. See the recent deaths of Susan St. James and Patrick Stewart for evidence. From Stewart’s Washington Post obituary it's evident what a sad childhood he had. A childhood that kids growing up today would in so many ways find unrecognizable. According to Stewart’s obit, his father was a “‘weekend alcoholic’ who came home swinging at his wife.” Stewart added that “It’s taken me decades of analysis, beginning in the late 1980s, to understand and cope with the impact of the violence, fear, shame and...

If you love your iPhone, you passionately adore free trade. Absent the division of labor that the iPhone is a monument to, the supercomputers that sit in our pockets wouldn’t exist. What’s important to remember is that just as no one person has the knowledge, resources, and intricate skills to create a pencil or toaster oven, no individual has anywhere close to the ability to create an iPhone. It doesn’t just take a village to create one, it takes the world. Which is where some errantly get worked up about Apple’s modern technological marvel. And they politicize the...

Last week, Google parent Alphabet lost roughly $500 billion in market value in a single day—a sharp reminder that while Washington has spent years challenging Google’s dominance, competition has continued to challenge the business model that has made that dominance possible. As The Wall Street Journal reported, the sell-off reflected investors’ concerns about Google’s transition to artificial intelligence. In its latest quarter, Google’s search revenue growth fell by nearly a third—from 17% to 12%—while AI threatens the advertising model on which much...

Washington has assembled a corporate portfolio worth tens of billions of dollars, and no one answers for it as a whole. Congress should charter a governing board for it in the lame-duck session, before the next Congress reshuffles committees. A 24/7 Wall St. analysis published October 28 counted about 40 federal equity stakes. Two days later, the largest of them lost roughly $12 billion in a single session. I’ve spent thirty years in institutional investment management and serve as an expert witness in securities and fiduciary cases. Opposing counsel’s first request is the...

In 1989 The Economist described a Soviet bus factory whose workers took sledgehammers to newly manufactured trucks. The bus factory needed only the truck chassis, but government rules required the truck factory to supply the whole vehicle, most of which the bus makers would destroy. Complying with the rules meant producing things only to smash them. The workers and managers understood the waste, but changing government standards was harder than dismantling trucks. Individually sensible responses to political directives produced collectively senseless results. Keep that factory in mind when...

Too bad Kamala Harris didn’t beat Donald Trump in 2024. Though Republicans will protest that Harris would have been much worse than Trump. Impossible. If you’re doubtful, just imagine the Republican reaction if Harris, upon inauguration as the U.S.’s 47th president, proceeded to acquire “golden shares” in U.S. corporations, demand stakes in others, and demand portions of global sales from still others. Imagine if Harris then - in total disregard for the Constitution - began mindlessly imposing tariffs on the nations of the world. Then imagine Harris proceeding to...

On Monday, 60,000 of you got the letter. I'm so sorry. But you get one day.One day. Pour the bourbon. Drink. Cry. Smoke. Say the things you can't say in the office — say them all. Take your day. All of it.Then we go to work.Not to be 1 of 1000. To be 1 of 1.I know the seat you're sitting in. Not the exact one. But close enough.I spent ten years building a company to 800 employees. In 2008, I nearly lost all of it in ten days. Ten days. I know the 3 a.m. math. I know what it feels like when the thing you built your life around stops being certain.Here's the honesty: what happened to you...

In The Affluent Society (1958), John Kenneth Galbraith challenged the assumption that businesses merely satisfy independently determined consumer wants. Producers also create wants through advertising and persuasion, he argued. His Dependence Effect questioned whether these wants justify ever-expanding private consumption. Milton Friedman emphasized consumer sovereignty: producers can propose, but consumers decide which products survive. Artificial intelligence makes this disagreement newly relevant. Galbraith was right that innovation creates wants. Before automobiles, nobody demanded...

Utah’s political class is mistaking prediction markets for gambling. Worse, in criminalizing prediction markets, the state of Utah is depriving its citizenry not just of the remunerative fruits of their knowledge, but also protection from the vagaries of business, weather, and so much else. Which is a very real gamble in the state of Utah.  If you’re doubtful, just consider the obvious. The amount of snowfall each year in Utah is very much the stuff of good returns for businesses in the state, or the opposite. Think winter 2025-26, and the oh-so-light snow...

The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence has been accompanied by concerns that the unchecked growth of AI could have negative consequences. Some of those making the most apocalyptic predictions are employees of technology companies working to develop AI. These concerns are given credence by many because of incidents of AI  going rogue and doing things like hacking,.  Not surprisingly, the reaction of many to these concerns has been to call for increased federal regulation. Legislation has even been introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders to place a moratorium on developing AI...

One of my most valuable mentors is someone you've probably never heard of, Chris Weber. Weber is an autodidactic genius. He’s such a great investor that he's never had a real job. His education came from libraries, where he spends most of his time. He took his teenage lawn-mowing money and then used gold futures to pyramid that grubstake into several million dollars. He got out of the 1970s commodity boom in 1981 when long-term rates hit 15% in the U.S. From there, he had a simple hurdle: he wasn't going to buy anything unless it was virtually certain to beat a guaranteed 15% a year. By...

History looks us in the eye and quietly asks, “Have I taught you nothing?” All money is nothing more than a medium of exchange. It is used to get stuff. That’s it. To be effective, it needs to be stable and a medium that others accept for voluntary transactions. Stable means that it holds its agreed-upon value. Throughout history, the most stable forms of money have been gold and silver. During our British colonial history, the British pound sterling was the favored monetary standard, as it was widely accepted and generally reliable in holding its value. However, there was...

The political left has made housing one of its central political issues—and has used it to win elections, for example, in New York City and Berlin. Left-wing politicians persuade voters that more government regulation, such as rent controls, will improve the housing situation. Yet numerous scientific studies have demonstrated that this is not the case. For example, Konstantin Kholodilin of the Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1051137724000020?via%3Dihub analyzed more than 200 studies on rent control and concluded that rent...

America’s banks are immensely self-conscious. That is the finding of a report, published recently by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), on the subject of debanking. But for the industry’s insecurities, private firms should not primarily be blamed. It is true that, as the report notes, banks have deprived Americans of financial services, the pattern of such actions being, at times, stochastic. Pervasive regulatory strictures distorted what ought to have been ordinary business decisions, giving banks little choice but to court regulators at the expense of their...