RealClearMarkets Articles

I was born in Thompson, Manitoba Canada in 1977. Small mining town. Not exactly the land of opportunity. There was no AI. No Google. No internet. If you wanted to invest, you needed connections. You needed a broker. You needed real money. Investing was a private club, and my family was not invited. Today is different. Today, I see opportunities that never existed even a decade ago.  Anyone can open a brokerage account with $100. Anyone can buy low-cost index funds from their phone. Anyone can ask AI how markets work and get an answer in seconds. Families, regardless of income, have more...

If a business is successful enough, it will inevitably be accused of breaking every rule under the sun. For the past few decades, American regulators wisely broke with their European counterparts and gave innovators the benefit of the doubt. This is unfortunately no longer so. Dubious antitrust actions, which surged under the disastrous tenure of Biden-era Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan, have continued into the second Trump presidency. President Trump has rightly rebuked Europe’s attempt to strangle U.S. tech through excessive regulation. However, current...

This week, the Trump administration appointed a new antitrust chief, Omeed Assefi. While cable news talking heads continue to obsess over the theatrics of the sudden personnel change — the reasons why his predecessor, Gail Slater, was fired or stepped down — the real question they should be asking is one of public policy. Namely, will Assefi focus his enforcement on maximizing the welfare of consumers — the standard for decades before Biden came along?  Say what you will about the Trump...

The U.S. Supreme Court has declared a large portion of the tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump to be unlawful. The U.S. Constitution grants the power to levy tariffs to Congress, not to the president. Trump had nevertheless relied on a 1977 emergency law to impose the import duties without congressional approval. The International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) allows a U.S. president to regulate trade during a national emergency, but it has previously been used for sanctions rather than tariffs. Trump had described the tariffs as essential to the economic security of the United...

Dear Reader, I would like for you to contact the President and promote my candidacy to make me the “Knife Czar.” If you don’t know what that is, it’s a new government office I concocted where I have unlimited power to slice federal spending. I promise there is no one more competent or more passionate than yours truly. My qualifications: I’m a stingy son of a bitch. I know how to squeeze a nickel until the buffalo squeals. When my car needs new tires, I go to the edge-of-town tire joint and get retreads. When some sort of silver jewelry was all the rage at my...

The frequently excellent Bret Stephens was thrilled about Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s elevation of Western civilization in his Munich Security Conference speech last week. Stephens desires a renewed reverence for the civilizational qualities that shaped Europe, and subsequently the United States. He laments the “damage” done to “normal citizens in modern democracies who, unless they’ve sought it out for themselves, lack a clear idea of what the west stands for.” Stephens is of the view that they should know “the [great] conversation between Plato...

Saudi Arabia has formally completed the liberalization of its equity market. In February 2026, the Kingdom removed the Qualified Foreign Investor framework, eliminating the final structural barriers that had limited direct foreign participation. International institutions can now invest without prior qualification structures, and swap-based access has been phased out. But market access was never the ultimate determinant of foreign ownership. Investability is. Saudi Arabia’s equity market is now roughly $2.3 trillion in capitalization — the largest in the Middle East. Yet foreign...

Stablecoins are no longer a crypto curiosity. With dollar‑denominated stablecoins already exceeding $250 billion in circulation and projections reaching into the trillions, they are rapidly becoming a mainstream component of the U.S. financial system. Much of the public debate frames concerns about stablecoins as little more than banks “whining” about competition and asking for tight restrictions to be slapped on a fast‑growing rival. That framing misses the point. Competition in payments is healthy. The issue is not that stablecoins challenge banks. It is that, once they pay...

Social Security is not going bankrupt, and by extension benefits won’t be cut. Not now, not in four years, not in forty. The irony in all of this is that existing and future retirees wouldn’t much care even if benefits were reduced. More on this in a bit, and why it’s better for U.S. taxpayers that benefits not be shrunk. For now, it’s useful to address bankruptcy and benefit cut rumors. The frequently wise Washington Examiner columnist Tiana Lowe Doescher wrote there recently that a failure to do anything about Social Security means bankruptcy in four years and 28%...

In 2022, Alex Epstein released "Fossil Future," his treatise on why humanity requires more coal, oil and natural gas to flourish. When the book appeared, the Biden administration was making extravagant pledges to fund global climate initiatives. Executives of major financial institutions and energy firms were making theatrical commitments to reducing their use and production of fossil fuels.  But four years later, those same industry titans are scrambling for excuses to delay or abandon net zero goals and seeking to develop the energy sources they had publicly disavowed. Business leaders...

The markets got a twin dose of macro indicators today—GDP growth and PCE inflation—and, almost on cue, much of the commentary missed the signal for the noise.  Start with growth.  Real GDP in 2025:Q4 came in at 1.4%, well below the 2.8% consensus estimate. The immediate narrative was predictable: the economy is slowing into 2026, momentum is fading, the expansion is rolling over, tariffs are to blame.  That reading is wrong.  According to the Council of Economic Advisers, the topline was artificially depressed by the 43-day Schumer–Jefferies federal...

Community banks like mine offer essential services across America to consumers and small businesses, including credit card programs that provide real advantages like local customer service, reward programs, and fair terms. Those services face a significant threat from big-box retailers and their allies in Congress, who want to enact harmful new regulations on credit cards.   Recently reintroduced legislation from Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) would grant large retailers the authority to process credit card...

Ohio has long promoted itself as a state that welcomes investment, encourages innovation, and rewards the companies that fuel its economy. Unfortunately, recent actions by Ohio Tax Commissioner Patricia Harris are sending a very different message – one that threatens to undermine commercial trust and trigger long-term capital flight across the state. At the heart of the issue is the Rover natural gas pipeline, a major interstate project completed in 2018 to meet rising energy demand in Ohio and several surrounding states. When planning the budget and projected rate of return for...

This week’s residential construction report — with housing starts beating expectations and single-family starts rising again — signals that Trump’s policy shift is beginning to unwind the housing distortions of the Biden era.  Housing inflation was one of the clearest affordability failures of those Biden years.  For working families, rent or mortgage payments are not discretionary expenses — they are the single largest component of consumer spending. When housing costs surge, everything else feels expensive.  You cannot import millions of illegal...

According to the New York Times, global warming isn’t a threat. About what you just read, the Times didn’t acknowledge the latter as much as it implied it. In a recent article, the Times reported that coastal areas are home to almost 40 percent of the U.S. population. Which is very telling about many things, including the threat (or lack thereof) associated with so-called global warming. That’s because where we live is a rather pure market signal calling into question the perceived threat of global warming. Think about it. Warming theorists have for the longest time told us...

Administrations have repeatedly tried to shine a bright light into the business practices of pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs). But those efforts have not been successful – until President Trump set his sights on lowering drug costs for the American worker. Thanks to his leadership, the Department of Labor is piercing the veil of secrecy that PBMs have hidden behind to introduce transparency in prescription drug pricing. PBMs were established in the U.S. in the 1960s to help insurers and employers manage their prescription drug benefits. The Employee Retirement Security Act (ERISA) of...

As a longtime professor and leader of the College of Public Affairs at the University of Baltimore, I spend a good deal of time thinking about power – who exercises it, how it’s employed, and whose ox gets gored when it’s constrained. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) provide a classic case study in the politics of power. The faculty I lead are hardly trying to wall AI off from their classrooms. Indeed, my university took the opposite approach by launching a Center for AI Learning and Community-Engaged Innovation (CAILI) and then purchasing...

West Virginia’s relative poverty isn’t an effect of California’s enormous wealth. The better way to look at it is to consider how much poorer the Mountain State would be minus all the advances hatched in California, and for that matter around the world. What matters is that people are producing, not where they’re producing. The more that “hands” and machines the world over are productive, the better the odds that American hands get to realize their enormous potential. Trade is not war, rather it’s mutual enrichment that makes war less...

One of the many complaints the free market right had with Lina Khan’s performance as Chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was her use of federal antitrust and consumer protection laws to advance progressive goals. For example, one of the pillars of Khan’s “neo or hipster Brandeisian” approach to antitrust was focusing on how a merger or acquisition would affect workers as part of the FTC’s approval process. In practice, this meant the FTC would claim that a merger or acquisition would harm workers by decreasing wages, worsening working...