RealClearMarkets Articles
The Trucking Crackdown: Safety Rule or More Populist Politics
Federal officials shut down 270 commercial driver training schools last week. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the move in Detroit alongside DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, calling it a coordinated fraud crackdown. Vice President Vance's Task Force to Eliminate Fraud backed it. Vance himself put it plainly at a Michigan campaign stop the same week: "Trucking is too important to let it go to border crossers." He also claimed roughly 200,000 commercial licenses have already been issued to unqualified individuals, including illegal immigrants. The obvious question: is this a genuine...
Why Capital Prefers a Power Plant To a Megawatt Saved
America is entering another power-building cycle. After roughly 15 years of nearly flat electricity use, U.S. demand grew an average of 2.1% a year over the past five years, according to the Energy Information Administration, with data-center servers a major reason growth is expected to continue.Utilities, technology companies and investors are responding with plans for new generation and transmission. But there is a quieter capital-allocation problem on the other side of the meter: finance is much better at underwriting a megawatt produced than a megawatt avoided.Put two projects before a...
Holman Jenkins Reveals the Real Crisis, and It's Not the National Debt
“I also remember 9/11. Every sense at the time recognized the magnitude of the event and also that the U.S., with so much money in its pockets, and political imperative being what it was, was about to engage in gross overkill.” That’s Holman Jenkins in last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal.
Jenkins’s words are a reminder of the faulty thinking informing James Buchanan’s (1919-2013) famous assertion that “The primary real burden of a public debt is shifted to future generations.” No, the burden is now. See Jenkins.
He observes that the world...
JD Vance's Social Engineering Is Costly and Unprincipled
In January 1971, Richard Nixon infamously quipped, “I am now a Keynesian in economics”. That spirit is now being channeled by JD Vance and an array conservative leaders who should be honest and admit, “We are now social engineers in family life.”
In what is an apparent attempt to satisfy family traditionalists, post liberals, and "common-gooders" on the right, while avoiding an open admission that affordability might not be a “hoax”, the Vice President has made a stay-at-home parent subsidy a priority. Reporting describes a...
Tariffs Keep Making America Cost More Without Making It Stronger
The U.S. government has proposed new tariffs on products from dozens of countries, arguing that some trading partners have not done enough to keep goods made with forced labor out of global supply chains.
This is clearly a worthy goal, but the proposal also reveals a broader weakness in U.S. trade policy: tariffs are increasingly used to address a range of problems. From forced labor to unfair competition and national security to dependence on China, the answer often looks the same: another tax at the border.
Tariffs may sound straightforward, but modern trade no longer works...
Washington Needs the 'Washington Consensus'
Earlier this month, the United States hosted a meeting of G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors in Asheville, North Carolina. Hundreds of journalistic outlets across America celebrated this important event by ignoring it entirely, while those that did mention it did so only to report on the controversial presence of the Russian finance minister. In the event, the Trump Administration used the occasion to push an agenda of economic deregulation, greater private-sector investment, reduced external imbalances, and myriad other policies. Cynics may sniff that the Administration, which...
The Brits Didn't Do During the Blitz What We Did During Covid
“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.” —Psalm 46
I’m an Anglophile. I proudly admit it. The British Empire brought civilization and order to an often savage world. During “the War,” Dad wrote letters home expressing his admiration for the Brits. Back then, the British stiff upper lip was a maxim explaining the character of a people.
My friend Bo Montague dropped off Erik Larson’s book The Splendid and the...
AI "Pauses" Will Regulate the U.S. Into Second Place
Elon Musk said Dario is right after Anthropic chief Dario Amodei called on frontier AI companies to slow down together. That should concern anyone who still believes competition matters. Musk presented Grok as an open-source alternative while attacking OpenAI for becoming closed-source and profit-driven. Amodei built Anthropic around safety, but the company later dropped its flagship pledge not to train more powerful systems without adequate safeguards already in place. Musk has endorsed Amodei’s call that would let the largest AI companies help decide how fast the field can move and...
Want Your Charity Dollars To Do More? Be the Pit Crew
Frank Perdue was famous for taking his father-and-son chicken farm from no employees to 20,000. What he was less known for was being entrepreneurial about charity.
Over and over, he chose to fund behind-the-scenes needs that enabled charities to spend more time delivering services and less time fundraising or handling the necessary work of simply keeping an organization alive. His gifts weren’t glamorous and were most often behind the scenes, but having watched him up close and personal, I concluded that he wasn’t just the most philanthropic person I ever met. He was the most...
Trump Deportations and Tariffs Protect American Workers
Recent headlines indicate that American employers are worried about a labor shortage due to President Trump’s enforcement of U.S. immigration law. A labor shortage, of course, will be good for American workers. His immigration and tariff policies indicate that Trump favors protecting both American producers and American workers. This was the policy that the U.S. adopted from the 1920s to the 1960s, usually seen as a golden economic age. Liberals laud this era, known as “The Great Compression,” as the apex of American economic equality.
America’s early history was one...
Republicans Shouldn't Shy Away From the Tax Debate
As the midterm election campaigns start to heat up, a key question for voters is what will Democrats do if they win control of Congress in November? They do not talk about it, but it is almost certain they will do what they did the last time they had control—-raise taxes and increase spending. As the Wall Street Journal has noted, Democrats are “on a taxing binge,” with Democrats in Washington and across the country proposing all sorts of tax increases. Republicans should be warning voters about these tax hikes, and promising instead to cut not raise...
You Can't Have a Prosperous Nation Without New Arrivals
“Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root.” Those were the words of Ronald Reagan.
Reagan was describing the communist opposition. He knew they would lose because countries defined by freedom and free markets always beat nations and ideologies rooted in authoritarianism and a lack of markets. Conservatives rightly believe Reagan was one of the foremost statesman of the 20th century, if not THE foremost.
Having entered the White House in 1981, and when substantial parts of the world weren’t free, by the time he left the White House in 1989, communism was on the...
Shareholder Ownership Gives Way to Corporate Control
Today’s business ownership landscape is increasingly complicated by financial, voting, contractual and capital arrangements. A direct relationship between ownership and control can no longer be assumed, particularly for strategically important companies.
Sika, a Swiss chemicals company, entered a four-year corporate battle in 2014, when building-material firm Saint-Gobain announced it would buy a controlling majority. Although the Burkard family owned 16% of shares, a dual-class structure granted them over 52% of voting rights. Sika showed why economic ownership does...
Don't Raise Rates Based On a PCE That Will Be Re-Written September 30th
The Federal Open Market Committee votes on interest rates September 16.
Two weeks later, on September 30, the Bureau of Economic Analysis will revise the PCE price index, the inflation measure the Fed targets, back to 2021 and publish the August reading in the same release.
Governor Christopher Waller has already said which way one of the changes is expected to go. On September 3 he said the change in the way the Commerce Department measures fees paid to stock-market traders and related professionals could lower 12-month PCE inflation by a few tenths of a percentage point. He called it "a...
9/11 Was a Tragedy On Top of An Enduring Tragedy
Oil in abundance is a given. The United States could find itself 100% bereft of oil, all the while at war with or embargoed by every oil-producing nation on earth, and the truth about oil abundance in the U.S. wouldn’t change one iota.
What ensures enormous amounts of oil consumption in the U.S. is NOT related to copious “proven reserves” in the U.S., but is instead 100% related to the fact that the American people are the most productive people on earth. And so long as Americans are economically productive, the world’s oil will flow to the U.S. no matter what.
It...
Trump's FTC Places a Bull's Eye On Affordability
According to a recent Reuters-Ipsos poll, Democrats and Republicans are tied on the question of which party voters trust more on economic issues. This follows a similar Reuters-Ipsos poll from earlier this year that put Democrats slightly ahead of Republicans on the economy. These polls are the first time in a decade that Democrats have either been tied or ahead of Republicans as the party voters trust to pursue policies that will deliver a strong economy.
The same poll that showed Democrats and Republicans tied on the economy also showed that voters preferred the Democrats’ approach to...
The Strait of Hormuz May Matter Less Than You Think
The Strait of Hormuz is one of the world’s most important energy chokepoints. It carries around a quarter of global seaborne oil trade, as well as major flows of liquefied natural gas and fertilizer. Recent conflict and attacks on shipping have sharply disrupted traffic, with serious consequences for energy and commodity markets.
The point is not that the Strait of Hormuz does not matter. It plainly does. The point is that a chokepoint’s strategic importance, its effect on global markets, its burden on a particular household, and the amount of public attention it receives are four...
Disagreeing With Joe Rogan. Money Will Not Fix Poverty
The United States fixed poverty over 250 years ago. Evidence supporting this claim can be found in the fact that the world’s poorest have long made the U.S. their destination not to attain security or handouts, but to find the work necessary to permanently escape poverty.
The U.S. as a magnet for the world’s poorest is an answer to Joe Rogan’s comment from one of his recent podcasts. Rogan asked his guest and viewers to “imagine how much less crime there would be if no one was ever starving.” The easy and true response is that there wouldn’t be any less...
The Carney Rowboat Versus the Trump Aircraft Carrier
This week, President Trump signed five proclamations that should end any illusion in Ottawa that this trade fight is a negotiation among equals. As of September 29, Canadian beer, wine, spirits, whey, molasses, and heavyweight motorcycles will not be taxed at the American border. Under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, they will be banned.
This is the lawful and entirely predictable consequence of a choice Prime Minister Mark Carney made three weeks ago. It will end very badly, not for America but for the Canadian economy and people.
Roughly three-quarters of everything...
Anti-Data Center Pols Recall 19th Century Railroad Skeptics
Every transformative period in American history has required new physical infrastructure.
The Industrial Revolution required railroads, factories and electric power. The automobile required highways. Commercial aviation required airports. The internet required fiber-optic networks and cellular towers.
Artificial intelligence requires data centers.
Yet politicians in both parties are suddenly campaigning against them. Some want moratoriums. Others warn that data centers will drain lakes, pave over farms and raise electric bills. Instead of explaining how America can build this infrastructure...
