RealClearMarkets Articles

Government spending is the biggest, most economy-sapping tax of all. But we’ve gotten ahead of ourselves. Backtracking, there’s a one-time wealth tax that Californians will vote on next month. The tax, if implemented, would collect 5 percent of the headline wealth of California’s many billionaires. How unfortunate if Proposition 40 passes, and worse, if it has teeth. Since the rich can’t reasonably spend it all, their untaxed and unspent wealth quickly morphs into fuel for economic progress as the abundant funds are matched with the corporations and entrepreneurial...

As the Supreme Court considers whether federal law preempts state climate lawsuits, Congress and the Courts should consider more serious failings.  Climate litigation is not, as has been argued, similar to tobacco litigation. The mass tobacco claims of the 1990s involved a substance strongly associated with small-cell lung cancer.  The three elements – a dangerous substance, causation, and provable exposure to an injured party – support a proper lawsuit, regardless of the jury’s assessment of the merits, which could involve a knowing assumption of...

The average first-time homebuyer in America is now 40 years old, according to the National Association of Realtors. It is one more sign of how far homeownership has slipped out of reach. The reasons are familiar: There are not enough homes, mortgage rates remain elevated, home prices have outrun incomes, and insurance, taxes, and other ownership costs have climbed. Federal Reserve Governor Michael Barr put the scale of the problem in stark terms last month: The Atlanta Fed's homeownership affordability index fell to 68 in July, its lowest level in 21 years.  The housing debate lays bare...

California has a peculiar approach to public health. You can buy cannabis, caffeinated beverages, and cigarettes. But smokers hoping to switch to flavored nicotine vapes face mounting restrictions. In September, Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation banning single-use nicotine vapes, citing battery fires and pollution. Yet cannabis vapes are exempt. Apparently, a discarded lithium battery is an environmental problem when it delivers nicotine, but not when it delivers cannabis. California has already prohibited the sale of most flavored nicotine products. Adults who prefer fruit-flavored...

A bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general is now asking the Supreme Court for something astonishing: permission to break one federally regulated national market into fifty separate fiefdoms. Strip away the consumer-protection language and the ask is simple. States want to license, tax and control prediction markets that Congress put under federal jurisdiction more than fifty years ago. The Courts must tell the states no. The legal map is a mess, and that is why the issue is urgent. The Third Circuit sided with Kalshi against New Jersey. The Ninth Circuit sided with Nevada. Inside the...

I recently visited Uruguay. It’s full of surprises. It’s the richest state in Latin America, without any - even superficially - held religious beliefs, in a Catholic-dominated continent.  There is no Christmas. In Uruguay, Christmas is called “Family Day.”  There is no Easter either – the dates are called “Tourist Week.” Even though the population was no longer practicing, the Constitution of 1917 separated Church and State officially, removing Catholicism as state religion. Though religious education was already eliminated from schools...

JPMorgan Chase is closing my business credit card account and won’t say why. Its letter, dated September 30 and received October 13, cites “concerning activity on your account or an account that you are associated with,” spotted during “ongoing monitoring.” The next day, Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould released a review of the nine largest national banks and called it “irrefutable evidence” that they “denied, debanked, and discriminated against customers and lawful businesses.” Any bank can fire a bad customer. When it hides the...

France's latest student protests reveal an uncomfortable problem in democratic politics: a relatively small number of people can impose enormous costs on society, while the government faces incentives to accommodate their demands rather than confront the disruption. On October 6, approximately 266,000 demonstrators, including students, teachers and parents, took to the streets demanding better educational conditions and increased public spending. The number sounds impressive. Yet it represents only 0.39% of France's population of roughly 69 million. The demonstrations, which began in...

Immigration is “a humiliating trial that exposes your most unflattering characteristics and your deepest weaknesses.” That’s Anya Gillinson in her 2024 memoir, Dreaming In Russian. Gillinson’s memories of immigration’s humiliations (her family came from the former Soviet Union) came to mind while reading Charles Gasparino’s latest piece in the New York Post. The Fox Business commentator wrote it to celebrate a recent celebration he attended for Italians on Wall Street. Italian Americans have come a long way. As Frank Bisignano (Social Security...

Across Europe, the housing shortage is getting worse – and left-wing parties have discovered it as a central political issue. Recently, the far-left party DIE LINKE even won the elections in Berlin, the German capital, campaigning on a demand to nationalize large housing companies. In Spain, hundreds of thousands of people have demonstrated in favor of stricter regulations. But do such measures really help? We should learn from Germany's experience, where a form of rent control known as the "Mietpreisbremse" (rent brake) was introduced back in 2015 and has since been tightened several...

Americans are being fed a simple story: data centers are about to break the electric grid. Every week brings new forecasts. Utilities revise load projections upward. Transmission planners sketch new lines. Commentators warn of shortages and point to data centers as the culprit. It sounds obvious. It is also incomplete. The problem starts with the label itself. "Data center" is treated as if it describes a single activity. It does not. The term combines two fundamentally different operations: traditional cloud computing, which often consolidates existing computing into more efficient...

Who cares what economists think? The question rates asking after a recent report in the Wall Street Journal noted how “economists increasingly believe that higher U.S. interest rates will define the rest of the decade.” Again, who cares what economists think? Lest readers forget, one year ago they thought precisely the opposite of what they think now. Former BB&T Bank CEO John Allison once quipped that he couldn’t point to even one forecast that the economists at the Fed got right during his time running the bank. Which isn’t a surprise. If economists could see...

The sheer size of Medicare and Medicaid has made it necessary that the federal government create a detailed, complex system for assigning a price to any service, device, or equipment provided by a hospital or doctor’s office, and most insurers piggyback off of that system. Effectively, the federal government dictates how much healthcare payers--that is, the entities that provide health insurance--pay for services.  One aspect of that pricing system is that health providers generally receive less for procedures done in an ancillary doctor’s office than in a bona fide hospital,...

On October 12, 2026, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences to Robert E. Hall of Stanford University and Michael Woodford of Columbia University "for microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation." The committee went further, declaring that their work had "generated a paradigm shift in stabilisation policy" and had made major crises far easier to manage, including the pandemic and the energy shocks of recent years. The prize is deserved. The claim deserves an audit. Hall showed in 1978 that if households spend according to their...

One pleasant surprise to come out of the second Trump Administration has been its approach to antitrust enforcement. Following his 2024 victory, many expected Trump to embrace Khanservatism. This is the name given to some on the populist right who want conservatives to continue the aggressive approach to antitrust policy adopted by Biden-era Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan and Justice Department Antitrust Division head Jonathan Kanter. Khanservatism is Khan-Kanter style antitrust enforcement used to accomplish conservative goals. These fears seemed to be confirmed when...

Confidence among American companies surveyed in China has risen, and Washington should welcome the improvement. But commercial success under existing rules does not establish that those rules work well. Firms can become better at operating across divided markets without resolving the costs of division. Nor does stronger confidence necessarily make business a stronger advocate for opening markets. The American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai’s 2026 business report supplies encouraging evidence. Among 262 responding members, 58 percent were optimistic about the next five years, up 17...

California must have the best tax code of any U.S. state. How else to explain that in the past year the Golden State attracted three times more investment than all 49 other U.S. states combined? Except that California doesn’t have a good tax system, as readers know. With a top income tax rate of 13%, California excessively taxes wealth. Still, the truth about California’s towering prosperity relative to other U.S. states rates mention as a way of questioning a recent paper by Cato’s Adam Michel about “The Flat Tax Advantage.” About it, there’s no...

During this time of increased political polarization, it is good to know that there is one issue uniting Trump-loving MAGA Republicans, Bernie Sanders-style Democratic Socialists, and everyone in between: opposition to data centers, especially large data centers built for artificial intelligence (AI). Part of the opposition stems from the public’s increasing skepticism of AI. An even larger part is generated by concerns over how AI will drive up electricity costs for those living close to the centers, as well as the high amount of water necessary to run the centers. Many data center...

Many portfolio lenders like banks and credit unions can potentially avoid the credit losses on home short sales by linking short sale approval to a requirement that the borrower defease the remaining mortgage payments on their below-market rate mortgage. In a short sale, a homeowner sells their home for less than the remaining balance on their mortgage with an agreement from the mortgage lender to accept less than the remaining mortgage balance and wave the lender’s legal right to foreclose on the property. Portfolio lenders like banks and credit unions typically retire the remaining...