RealClearMarkets Articles

At Luke Russert's college graduation, Tim Russert (1950-2008) joked about the fake ID used by his son during college to get into bars. Apparently the ID was quite good. Laughter at Tim Russert’s recall was said to be widespread, and knowing. Most Americans entering bars for the first time at age 21 have endless stories of getting into drinking establishments before the legal age. It’s hard not to think about the lived experience of most adults as Australia’s “Social Media Minimum Age Act” becomes law. As of December 10th, Aussies under the age of 16 no longer...

In 2026, America will mark a remarkable convergence of anniversaries. It will be the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, which explained how free people, trading freely, could generate prosperity on a scale the world had never known. It will also be the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the bold assertion that liberty, not power, is the rightful foundation of a just society. It will be a consequential midterm election year, shaping the direction of American policy for years to come. That convergence should give Americans pause—because...

iRobot, manufacturer of the Roomba robot vacuum, has filed for bankruptcy. This is not unexpected. In October, after negotiations with a potential buyer fell through, the company announced that, “we may be forced to significantly curtail or cease operations and would likely seek bankruptcy protection." iRobot’s decline was partially due to the rise of new entries into the robot vacuum market, in particular the Chinese-made Roborock.  In 2024, Roborock led the global electronic vacuum market with 16% of global unit sales and 22.3% of the market's...

A new public opinion poll has been released, measuring the most important issues facing the country today. Not surprisingly, inflation and the economy are voters’ top concerns. According to the Harvard CAPS Harris poll, inflation and affordability is the number one issue, followed closely by the economy and jobs.For Democrats, the poll confirms their strategy to focus on affordability. They have been buoyed by the surprise victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayor race, who ran on a platform focusing on affordability issues. His agenda included substantial tax increases on...

“That’s really scary.” Those are the words of Neil Carey, a retired social worker who is 87. Carey is describing his occasional memory lapses that aren’t due to traditional Alzheimer's. As Carey explained it to the New York Times, he formerly had a “wonderful vocabulary,” but presently his “field of words is far reduced.” While he still reads, exercises and socializes, Carey increasingly forgets names and details, and recently forgot a minister’s homily at church despite listening very closely. Mentioned previously is that Carey...

Conservatives need to relax. See their ranting about Netflix’s proposed purchase of Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD). Podcaster Benny Johnson described the possible deal as “the most dangerous media consolidation in American history.” Trump “loyalty enforcer” Laura Loomer wrote on X that if the “Trump administration doesn’t kill off the merger, CNN will be transformed into the Obama News Network,” while “activist” Jack Posobiec lamented that the merger “is all about the Obamas taking over media.” If we ignore that CNN...

Jamie Dimon’s warning about Europe’s dwindling competitiveness was entirely accurate.  It would have been even more so had he singled out the primary reason: Europe’s adherence to the Paris Climate Agreement.  Recently at the Reagan National Defense Forum, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon delivered a hard truth to Europe.  “They’ve gone from 90% of the GDP of America to 65. That’s not because America did anything bad to them. It’s their own bureaucracy, their own cost… They do some wonderful things on their safety nets, but...

Ever since the first lawsuits over rental pricing software surfaced, politicians have tried to blame algorithms for America’s housing crisis. But Trump’s DOJ recently settled an algorithmic-pricing case brought under the prior administration, narrowing it to concerns about data-sharing rather than any claim that software was driving rents higher. The settlement did not find coordinated landlord price-setting or rents rising outside normal market forces. Yet, Senator Elizabeth Warren continues to pound this argument, accusing algorithmic pricing of letting...

Why is Ray Dalio’s debt alarmism so wrongheaded? The view here is that successful investing (Dalio is brilliant at it) is incredibly difficult, while economics is blindingly simple. The investor in Dalio is complicating what isn’t. See his recent post on X: “When an empire runs out of its own money, it is able to increase the supply of money. However, printing more money causes borrowing to increase creating a financial bubble.” Wrong, and wrong again. Dalio the investor surely knows why. Applying his analysis to the United States, if it were ever true that the U.S....

Europe stands as the self-proclaimed cathedral of the “green” transition. Bureaucrats in Brussels and politicians in Berlin have spent decades lecturing the world on the moral necessity to abandon hydrocarbons. They have constructed a narrative of the European Union as a shining city powered by the breeze and sun, modeling a net-zero utopia.  Yet, when the first real chill of winter settled over the continent this fall, that facade collapsed under the weight of physical reality.Europe depends on fossil fuels for approximately 70% of its total energy consumption. This figure...

It is time to restore reality to the boardroom: true women's rights rely on acknowledging biological distinctions, not on high-risk corporate activism that sacrifices safety and merit for a perfect diversity score. Corporate America has increasingly drifted from neutral business practices toward adopting controversial social agendas, often prioritizing ideology over merit and shareholder value. A significant portion of these recent business decisions implicates "transgenderism" and the rights of girls and women (see, for example, here, here, and here). Yet, these sweeping...

For decades, marketers have been chasing the holy grail of marketing – the perfect ability  to get the right ad to the right person at the right time in an effortless fashion. Before AI, this  was never really possible. We moved from radio advertising to linear TV to digital, each  time getting closer to the holy grail but missing the mark on truly effective marketing. Now  with AI-based advertising, this perfect ability is finally possible.  Marketing used to be about brand building. The original intent of virtually all advertising  was to build a brand...

The $1.8 trillion private credit market rests on a foundation most participants don't fully understand—and recent high-profile failures suggest that foundation may be crumbling. When Tricolor Auto Group filed for bankruptcy last year, the immediate focus fell on the $1.1 billion in liabilities and the hundreds of millions in losses absorbed by institutional investors. Yet the bankruptcy proceedings revealed something more troubling: duplicate pledging of the same collateral at all levels of the industry. By the time the issues were discovered, capital had been deployed, loans had been...

Inflation is pricing many citizens out of the housing market. Home prices have increased more than 50% since the start of the pandemic. The median age of first-time home buyers is 41, the highest on record. There is a simple solution to the housing crisis. President Trump has floated the idea of eliminating capital gains on home sales. A more ambitious agenda would eliminate capital gains taxes on owner occupied homes entirely. This is in fact what Canada has done, homeowners in Canada are exempt from paying tax on the profit from the sale of an owner-occupied home.  Eliminating capital...

When it comes to monetary policy, the commotion is rarely where the real action is. The Fed cut its interest rate target range to 3.50 - 3.75 percent. This was largely expected. However, Fed governors were divided about the direction monetary policy should go. Decisions are usually unanimous, which means the three dissensions are causing a stir. But while Fed infighting can be entertaining, the interest rate decision shouldn’t be the story. Longer-run money supply trends matter far more for economic performance. Here’s something interesting. The Fed has engaged in what...

I just didn’t know—until the other day, when it finally hit me. Jerome Powell is God, and the FOMC is the Holy of Holies. The cherubim floating above them, fluttering their wings and singing praises, are all econ majors. The Wall Street sycophants and Washington insiders are the seraphim. Meanwhile, the media resemble Jim Jones devotees in Guyana, never questioning the absurdity of it all. I’ll have another glass of punch, please! On Wednesday, I was driving up I‑95 to Washington, tuned to Bloomberg Radio. I listened to all of Jerome Powell’s remarks and the...

Kyle Schwarber recently signed a 5-year, $150 million deal to stay with the Philadelphia Phillies. Which speaks to our exciting present and future. As a former college teammate once put it about Schwarber, he's "not going to go into macroeconomics and get an A," but "when you get on the baseball field, that kid might as well be Albert Einstein."  It’s a reminder of the bigger meaning of falling test scores, and the paradoxically powerful progress they signal. The great unlearning whereby young people cease building a little or a lot of knowledge in traditional subjects signals a...

The problem with economics is the economists. They arguably understand what powers economic growth the least. Consider “World Pays a Price for China’s Growth,” the latest piece by Wall Street Journal columnist Greg Ip. In it, the non-economist (that’s not a knock on him) in Ip wrote that “Even as the U.S. rolls out tariffs, its imports are up 10% so far this year from a year earlier,” while China’s are down 3%. Translating Ip’s agitation, “China” is exporting in growing amounts “while imports have flatlined.” Ip contends...

It’s late October 2007 at Oppenheimer & Co. in New York. Trading screens flicker green and red as brokers bark into phones between sips of scalding black coffee. The market is hot — no time to let anything cool down. Meredith Whitney, a thirty-seven-year-old analyst with a coroner’s eye for balance-sheet anomalies, is finishing a report on Citigroup. Trillions in assets span more than a hundred countries, with a market value that only months earlier sat in the hundreds of billions. The numbers look invincible. And that’s usually when Whitney finds...