RealClearMarkets Articles

The film industry wasn’t glamorous in the early days. That’s what’s conveyed at Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capital, an exhibit featured at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. The creators of what eventually personified glamour to the world were the opposite of glamorous, and deemed unworthy of work in traditional entertainment. Getting more specific, “Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe" were the individuals who created an industry that entertains the world to this day. It's just that these immigrants were looked...

“These kids today” is as old as the United States. And that’s bullish. It’s something to keep in mind as Hoover Institution senior fellow and Global Liberty Institute co-founder Scott Atlas becomes the latest, but surely not the last conservative to lament the state of young American adults. Writing recently at the Wall Street Journal, Atlas indicted a whole generation that he’s part of (the Baby Boomers) for what they allegedly did to their kids. Boomers, along with the Gen X, Millennials, Gen Zs and others will perhaps be confused by the portrait of American...

A recent federal court decision, Liberty Global v. United States, deserves the attention of policy makers and the public at large. My interest in this issue stems from my time as a state senator and, subsequently, from my time as Nebraska's Tax Commissioner responsible for the regulation and enforcement of state tax laws. Those experiences gave me a close-up view of two of our co-equal branches of government and instilled in me a deep appreciation for the separation of powers between them. This court decision presents an example of that separation eroding. At issue is the IRS's use of a legal...

I spent the first 15 years of my life under communism, the next 15 years in Israel, and since the end of 1976 had an accidental career on the North American continent.  However, I wanted to grasp American Jews’ political alignments, their continued support for the Democratic party, puzzling many.  These are the observations that I put together to solve this mystery.   Jews arrived in the U.S. in large numbers during the great migrations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Having faced vicious antisemitism in Tsarist Russia, the even more barbaric, savage one...

Once technology has proved its usefulness, it is not willingly abandoned.  Throughout history, this lesson has proved itself countless times; these successive proofs are termed “progress.”  Yet many so-called “progressives” want to reverse the AI revolution now taking place; is a fitting testament to the regression that their ideology offers to society.  Most famously, the Luddites tried to smash away the industrialization of England’s textile industry in the 19th century.  Undoubtedly, they were not the first group to try to stop...

One of the most significant Supreme Court decisions issued this term gives President Trump the ability to tell appointees of independent agencies, “you’re fired.” The specific case, Trump v. Slaughter, was brought by former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) board member Rebecca Slaughter. Slaughter was appointed to the FTC board by President Trump in 2018 to fill one of the vacant Democratic seats. Under federal law the FTC is governed by a five-member board, with only three members allowed from the same party. This is why it has become customary to have three board members...

Social Security was a monstrous mistake. That’s paradoxically why it must not be “reformed.” Reform would unleash a spending frenzy from Congress on a series of small mistakes that have the potential to eventually become monstrous ones. See George Will’s recent column for evidence. About the origins of Social Security, Will writes that “Ninety-one years ago, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed Social Security as — how quaint this now seems — protection against “poverty-ridden old age.” Yes, precisely. If we can ignore the...

On July 10, the Department of Labor told the Supreme Court that retirement plan fiduciaries should be judged by how they made their decision, not by whether the decision made money. The brief, filed in Anderson v. Intel Corp. Investment Policy Committee, argues that ERISA imprudence claims require a named benchmark and a documented process, not just a bad quarter. Washington is treating this as doctrine in the making. A Massachusetts judge settled the question 196 years ago. Justice Samuel Putnam answered this in Harvard College v. Amory, a case about a trust that lost...

Americans consume “Russian oil.” What you’ve just read isn’t a sign of corruption stateside, rather it’s a signal of basic economics. Production begets imports from around the world always, and from every country, friend or foe. This includes Iran.  The only barrier to this peace-enhancing state of play is that political classes can sap economic vitality by figuratively dynamiting bridges and ships with taxes otherwise known as tariffs, or they can figuratively throw boulders into ports to limit the arrival of imports via similar taxation.  It’s...

I spent the past week ducking into Las Vegas's tobacco-scented, windowless casinos to escape the 110-degree Nevada heat between conference sessions. Inside, rows of digitized slot machines, alongside classics like craps and roulette, felt like relics of a bygone era. The premise hasn't changed: The house always wins. Yet that hasn't stopped the struggling casino industry from trying to stake its claim on the next generation of wagering. Casino lobbyists recently urged Maryland gaming regulators to ask federal officials to crack down on prediction markets, arguing that this emerging financial...

At a quickening pace over the last 18 months, global financial institutions are treating security as a primary driver of capital allocation. Security, in this context, should be understood broadly to mean issues of global and national security, resilience, and geopolitics. The most prominent example is J.P. Morgan’s launch of its Security and Resiliency Initiative in October 2025 – a $1.5 trillion, 10-year plan to facilitate, finance, and invest in industries critical to economic security and resiliency, including supply chain and advanced manufacturing, defense and aerospace,...

Earlier this year, juries in California and New Mexico returned significant verdicts against Meta for harms inflicted on children through its platforms. Within hours, some supporters of the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA) seized on the verdicts as proof that legislatures must enact the bill. The irony is breathtaking: Meta has spent millions lobbying for this very bill in more than half of U.S. state legislatures and Congress precisely to avoid paying judgments like the ones recently handed down.  The lobbying campaign has only intensified as the U.S. Senate Commerce, Science, and...

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a fraud. Centrally planned, politicized consumption of precious wealth (government spending) adds to the number, while massive inflows of global wealth meant to profit from said country’s soaring productivity actually subtract from this most misleading of numbers. That U.S. GDP rose in 2008-2009 after GM and Chrysler were bailed out against the wishes of the pesky marketplace (what do markets know after all?) just adds to the overwhelming absurdity of the calculation. Except that American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) research fellow Thomas...

Even now, in a time of deregulation, the government interferes in the marketplace too much. There’s a mish-mash of independent D.C.-based agencies that lets bureaucrats force companies to make changes when they merge that Congress could never approve. The role these agencies play in overseeing mergers should be limited to protecting national security interests and ensuring the consumer welfare standard is not violated. Anything more is overreaching. Unfortunately, there’s no watchdog to watch the watchdogs. Congress seems reluctant to use its power to challenge agency...

A recent viral essay by Johann Kurtz makes a case worth taking seriously: young adults look fine in the official statistics and are not fine in reality. I recently wrote something related but narrower myself. Real incomes are up, unemployment has been low, televisions and other consumer goods are nearly free. Yet the young are not marrying, not buying homes, not having children. Kurtz’s explanation is that previous generations inherited an enormous stock of free social capital: trusted neighbors, functional public schools, safe streets, marriageable-by-default spouses; and that...

Kathy Hochul, Governor of New York, is a political hack. Always has been. As a student at Syracuse, she was a very left-leaning political activist, organizing boycotts, lecturing the administration on how to invest its money, even demanding that Syracuse rename its football stadium. Snore! Since her days of being an insufferable, yapping liberal college student, she has spent her entire career in government politics and influence peddling, sucking up to all the unhinged know-nothings in New York State. She has never even run a lemonade stand, but last week she did something extraordinary for...

Roxanne Brown assumed the presidency of one of America’s largest labor unions and has not been afforded the luxury of a long and quiet transition period.  United Steelworkers (USW) is not only preparing to begin negotiations with U.S. Steel over collective-bargaining agreements that are set to expire on September 1st, but does so upon emerging from a couple rather rancorous years through which previous leadership tripped over itself in a brutal and ultimately pointless and self-defeating expedition to derail the Nippon-US Steel merger. As corporate mergers go, Nippon’s $14.9...

Harvard is thriving. So are Stanford and Princeton. See the tuition charged by all three: at Harvard it’s $59,000, at Princeton it’s $65,000, and it’s $67,000 at Stanford. Here’s the question, or questions: what if all three schools quadrupled tuition? Does anyone seriously think a quadrupling would limit the ability of all three to fill out their classes. Better yet, does anyone think it would result in compromised student quality?   In contemplating the questions, cast ideology aside. It’s not the point. If we ignore the happy truth that the...

The American economy is currently locked in a fascinating tug-of-war between structural domestic strength and external geopolitical chaos. For months, the fundamental data has pointed toward a roaring supply-side renaissance.  Yet, as American families look at the signs at their local service stations, a lingering question remains: Why are we still paying nearly $3.85 a gallon for gasoline when domestic economic forces say it should be much lower? Geopolitical Friction Hits the Pump The answer lies in the volatile crosscurrents of global energy markets; specifically, the high-stakes...