RealClearMarkets Articles

Milton Friedman was sometimes wrong. Revered by right and many on the left, a look back reveals thoughts and actions that were sometimes puzzling. Take the work Friedman did at the U.S. Treasury during WWII. Historical accounts indicate that he was one of the economists who helped design tax-withholding. Considering Friedman’s correct stance that government spending is a tax, he seemingly didn’t embrace his association with a system that substantially enhanced the federal government’s ability to penalize work. Then there’s his stance on money. How Friedman got money so...

With little public discussion, the Social Security Administration (SSA) implemented several changes to the application process for retirement and other benefits.  The financial press and Congress have not yet picked up on these new rules, but they will have important effects on those seeking benefits. The new rules have been sold as a way of allowing advocates (third parties), often working with individuals with low income and health problems, to better assist clients applying for Social Security. These third parties can now establish “protective filings” on behalf...

“I have come to the conclusion that an economic catastrophe must happen before a majority of my colleagues will get serious about curbing out of control government spending.” That’s then Rep. Thomas Massie on X in 2024. His post informs a surely minority (if not singular) view among libertarians that Massie isn’t a libertarian. While Massie caucuses with free-thinkers, his views have much less to do with libertarianism than is commonly assumed. See the quote that opens this piece. Implied is that with “out of control government spending,” the...

On April 15th, 2026 Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Andrew Ferguson and fellow Commissioner Mark Meador testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. Their testimony should please supporters of a restrained approach to antitrust enforcement. Without directly mentioning Lina Khan (his predecessor at the FTC) by name, Ferguson seemed to repudiate her holistic approach to antitrust. Chair Ferguson stated that the FTC is not a “general economic regulator”, but an agency whose mandate is limited to consumer protection and antitrust...

Ingratitude is one of the chief faults of human nature and, consequently, one of the strongest of all the forces in politics. Too often, proposed intrusions into the market are predicated on nothing more than a great forgetting of what benefits the market provides, benefits that can be had only in an atmosphere of economic freedom. Would-be planners assume that tinkering with one aspect of an industry’s operations will not muck up the whole. An illustrative instance of this phenomenon is debates over regulating app stores. What Europe did with its Digital Markets Act, some on Capitol...

There’s no looming “insolvency” for Social Security. Not in 2032, 2052, or 2102. It’s all politics, from both sides. How we know can be found in the fact that there was never a Social Security “lock box" in the first place. Instead, Social Security was always an extra income tax foisted on all working Americans. And the revenues raised from the income tax were spent in full, every year. Of course, that’s why present and future Social Security recipients needn’t worry. And it also logically helps explain, beyond great wealth in the senior citizen...

In 1978 the United States Supreme Court fired the shot heard ‘round the consumer finance world. In a now overlooked case involving a dispute between a bank in Nebraska and one in Minnesota, the Supreme Court ruled that for a credit card agreement between an individual living (or traveling) in one state and a bank located in the other, the interest rates terms of the contract would be governed by the law of the state in which the bank is located, not the consumer. The effect of the Supreme Court’s ruling (known since as the Marquette case) was to allow consumers residing in states...

The race to dominate artificial intelligence ('A.I.') is no longer just about algorithms, it is about energy.Let's be frank - Compute is power, and power is now the decisive constraint. In that equation, Norway, Finland and the Nordics writ large are quietly positioning itself as one of the most strategically important countries in the global AI economy.For decades, the region was defined by oil and gas exports. Today, it is leveraging something even more valuable in the AI era: abundant, reliable, and nearly carbon-free electricity.With roughly 98% of its power generated from renewable...

The first rule in reading an inflation report is to ask what kind of inflation it is. Demand inflation, wage-price inflation, tariff inflation, housing inflation, and energy-shock inflation are not the same animal. They do not have the same cause. They do not require the same policy response. Most importantly, they are not all cured by higher interest rates.  The May PPI, like yesterday’s CPI report, points to the same basic diagnosis: America is facing an energy-led price shock. Do not raise interest rates into the teeth of this shock.  The critical policy question is not...

Jennifer Aniston is single. But as a 2015 write-up from here pointed out, Aniston’s status was a choice as opposed to a situation that she couldn’t escape. Realistically, millions and perhaps billions of men would have gladly changed Aniston's status to “married.” And they still would. Aniston holding out for something better arguably explains the U.S. housing situation more ably than commentary from the various economic religions presently does. Not surprisingly, left, right and in between have all sorts of policy prescriptions that they just know would render...

What if the greatest investment in history wasn't a stock… but a country? As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, much of the reflection will focus on politics, culture, and global leadership. There's another lens less discussed, yet just as consequential: America as the most successful long-term investment in history. From its earliest days, America wasn't just founded as a nation. It was funded as an idea. The first colonies were financed by joint-stock companies, early ventures that pooled capital in pursuit of uncertain but transformative returns. That spirit of...

For all the debate about inflation, tariffs, and government spending, one of the most important economic developments in America has received relatively little attention: a sustained decline in labor force participation. Millions of Americans are no longer in the labor force. Before the pandemic, 63.3 percent of Americans were working or looking for work. Today, that figure is 61.8 percent. That 1.5 percentage-point decline represents roughly four million fewer labor-force participants than if pre-pandemic participation rates had been maintained. The obvious question is: where did they...

After years in Congress and public life, I’ve often discussed retirement security with interested citizens. No matter your profession or political affiliation, the concerns are remarkably similar: people want to know that if they work hard, save responsibly, and plan ahead, they will be able to retire with dignity and peace of mind. They also believe that achieving this goal should not depend on whether someone worked in the corporate world or chose a career in service to others. Yet today, millions of Americans who rely on 403(b) retirement plans – teachers, church employees,...

The financial press needed only minutes to take a hot CPI headline number and turn it into a Fed-panic story. CNN promptly won the ugly-poster-child award, telling viewers that consumer prices “spiked” and that the Fed is now more likely to raise rates next than lower them.   Reuters offered the buttoned-down version of the same mistake: inflation has hit its fastest pace in three years, rate cuts are being pushed further into the future, and some analysts now see a growing probability of hikes if energy prices stay elevated.  That is exactly backward.  The May...

Last week, JPMorgan, one of Wall Street’s longtime crypto skeptics, filed to launch a money market fund on Ethereum. Days later, BlackRock did the same. Within weeks, Goldman Sachs and BNY Mellon announced plans to tokenize money market funds, SoFi issued a stablecoin, and Deutsche Börse poured $200 million into Kraken. After a decade of dismissing digital markets as a fringe experiment, the world’s most powerful financial institutions suddenly began racing toward the same blockchain rails. What sparked this sudden shift? They’ve all...

Matthew Lynn writes that a "financial castrophe" is in our future. He claims it's due to the national debt. Lynn's analysis implies that markets are quite stupid. Misunderstanding and non sequitur follow. Let’s start with Lynn’s headline assertion that “A financial catastrophe is looming.” Except that there’s $39 trillion worth of debt, get it? Lynn does not. It’s plainly lost on him that as the $39 trillion number attests, U.S. debt is the most owned income stream in the world. Lynn’s catastrophizing implies that he knows something the deepest...

If you ask American families to describe today's economy in a single word, the answer you keep hearing is uncertain. That's not a passing mood. It has become the defining feature of our era. For nearly two decades, households have been asked to absorb one shock after another. The 2008 financial crisis. A decade of historically low interest rates. A global pandemic. Tariff regimes that seem to rewrite themselves every quarter. A stock market at record highs sitting next to a labor market that has quietly gone cold. Some of what families are feeling is the product of our always-on information...

The latest trade report delivers a simple but powerful message: America is selling more to the world, importing more of what it needs to rebuild at home, and steadily shrinking the trade deficit.  This is the unmistakable triumph of Trump tariff and tax policy. President Trump is the strategist who changed the battlefield, and his field-general trio — U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — is executing the campaign.   The weapons are familiar but too long underused: Section 232 to defend...

Antitrust enforcers and policy makers generally view the digital economy as a collection of separate products: search, advertising, app stores, social media, smartphones. Regulate each piece aggressively enough, the theory goes, and competition will flourish. But the digital economy doesn’t work that way. The Justice Department’s cases against Google treat search and advertising as distinct markets. The Federal Trade Commission’s long-running pursuit of Meta treated Instagram and WhatsApp as products whose acquisitions allegedly reduced competition....