RealClearMarkets Articles

As it works to determine how to safeguard the sharing of and access to consumer financial data, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) faces a clear choice.  It can allow market-based frameworks developed by the private sector to continue evolving, stepping in only where genuine gaps or abuses emerge. Or it can try to revive broken and ineffective Biden-era rules that override the marketplace with one-size-fits-all mandates that will hurt innovation without protecting individuals.  The free market should prevail here.  Consumer financial data is deeply personal. How...

First, they came for the billionaires; then for the millionaires; then, the homeowners.  Sound incredible?  In California, in Rhode Island, and in New York City, they already are.  The policy of redistribution is on the march.  In California, a billionaire tax proposal is seeking 875,000 registered-voter signatures by June 24th to get on this November’s ballot.  It is already making headlines because if passed by California voters, its one-time (they promise), five-percent tax on net worth over $1 billion would apply to those residing in the state...

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos can’t realistically spend all the wealth they’ve created. That’s why both epitomize progress. It’s not just that they’ve transformed how we live, it’s that their inability to spend the abundant fruits of their commercial genius means that what they don’t spend will be continuously directed to entrepreneurs and businesses intent on vastly improving on the present. It’s important to remember this as Cornell economics professor Eswar Prasad casts aspersions at the New York Times on the savings fruits of production in China....

Remember domestic issues? The American people do. An analysis of YouGov data by The Economist shows that the number one issue for Americans is (still) inflation. Number two: jobs and the economy. Three: health care. After that, taxes and government spending, civil rights, and civil liberties. National security is in tenth place. After months of setting the agenda, President Donald Trump is suddenly on his back foot on the issue of affordability. Even in Texas, Trump’s net approval is down -17.2 points. So, what to do? The main drivers of affordability are big ticket items...

Financial regulation is often written in response to crises or booms. Both are too reactive to produce durable market structure. Rules drafted during periods of stress tend to be narrow and enforcement-driven, focused on containing recent failures. Rules written during rallies tend to be permissive and defer hard solutions on risk allocation, disclosure, and supervision to the future. Neither approach yields stable rules that market participants can follow across cycles. The most effective regulatory frameworks are built during periods of lower activity, when market participation has...

President Trump prides himself on being a destroyer of “woke nonsense” like affirmative action. “Our country will be Woke no longer!” he proclaimed to a joint session of Congress in March. “Whether you are a doctor, an accountant, a lawyer, or an air traffic controller, you should be hired and promoted based on skill and competence, not race or gender.”  Trump is correct to denounce identitarian bean-counting. A growing majority of Americans agree that hiring decisions and college admissions should be based on merit, not immutable traits....

As the new year begins, Congress is still debating extending the Obamacare subsidies contained in the 2021 Covid Relief Bill. If Congress does not extend the subsidies, Americans who receive health insurance through the Obamacare exchanges could see their premiums double this year. This could cause many of them, especially young and healthy people, to cancel their insurance (Obamacare requires most Americans to purchase some form of health insurance, but the 2017 Tax Act reduced the penalty for non-compliance to zero).This will result in further increases in...

Australia’s young people are way too smart for Australia’s politicians. See the recent implementation of Australia’s “Social Media Minimum Age Act.” The Aussie law is meant to protect youths from the alleged harms of social media. The law’s conceit won’t age well. Easily missed by Australia’s political class is that the innocuous sounding legislation aims to protect young people born after 2010. Which foretells the Social Media Minimum Age Act’s substantial futility. Those born after 2010 quite logically have no sense of life without...

This week’s revision of third-quarter GDP offers early but compelling evidence that the long-awaited Trump manufacturing boom is beginning to take shape—even as it highlights the power of Trump trade policy to boost exports, restrain imports, and narrow the trade deficit.  Real GDP growth for the quarter was revised up to a strong 4.4 percent annualized rate. That improvement was not driven by government spending or one-off statistical quirks. It was powered by rising exports, falling imports, and strengthening private-sector production—the precise channels President...

“The U.S. must build, baby.” The latter is the subhead to a recent opinion piece published at the right-of-center Manhattan Institute. Supposedly the easy answer to housing affordability is “build baby, build.” On the left, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are presently being lionized for promoting an “abundance” agenda of more homebuilding that will supposedly make homeownership more affordable. Isn’t bipartisanship great? More realistically, it’s a reminder that the only thing scarier than ideological divide is agreement. It’s frequently a...

Owning a home is core to Millennials’ American Dream. The good news is that the largest generation in America is highly motivated to purchase a home in 2026, despite housing market unaffordability. We appreciate that policymakers want to help our generation catch up to our Baby Boomer parents and Gen X siblings in homeownership. However, some national proposals that sound appealing will have little impact on increasing younger generations’ ability to buy a home. The best ways to move Millennials from motivated and into a new home are still to increase housing supply through...

Successful economies provide opportunities, growth, and economic wellbeing for the citizens of a country. It is important to understand the root causes of why some economies are successful while others are not, and in the worst cases, abysmal failures where the citizens live in poverty. After decades of watching economies succeed and fail, one lesson is clear. Incentives, the most powerful force on earth, drive behavior. People respond to what they are rewarded for, and when incentives are aligned with the right goals, societies prosper. Most people want to build better lives for themselves...

Across the Atlantic, a self-inflicted disaster is steadily unfolding. One of the United States’ closest allies, the United Kingdom, has surrendered energy riches and industrial prowess.  This decline is not the result of any shortage of capital, technological capacity or natural resources. Instead, it is the consequence of an ideologically driven climate agenda that has elevated “green” symbolism over engineering reality.  For years, politicians have beaten their chests about the U.K.’s "world-leading" renewable capacity. They paraded statistics showing wind...

The worst thing for a country's economy is for legislators to borrow money for deficit spending during economic downturns. Too bad no one agrees, including those perhaps pre-disposed to agree. For background, a recent Washington Post editorial lamented that “During a three-year span of low unemployment, economic expansion, increasing revenue and no major foreign wars, the budget deficit was larger as a share of the economy than any year of the 1930s, the decade of the Great Depression.” The Post’s implied point found can be found in the title of the aforementioned editorial:...

For decades, “private credit” was synonymous with rigid structures and standardized term loans with fixed covenants that resembled off-the-shelf products. That’s changing. Today, what’s broadly known as private debt – which includes middle-market leveraged buyout (LBO) lending, asset-based lending, and venture debt – is emerging as a flexible capital solution, designed to reflect how individual companies actually operate, scale, and weather uncertainty. Much of the growth in private credit has come from middle-market lending that shifted from banks to...

An article published in 1978, by Joan and Richard Sweeney, titled “Monetary Theory and the Great Capitol Hill Baby-sitting Co-op Crisis,” offers surprising insights into what crypto is and the functions of “money” it may fulfill. The story is this: in the 1970s a baby-sitting co-operative with 150 couples as members decided to issue coupons allowing the bearer to one-hour of baby-sitting. It turns out that, after a while, few coupons were in circulation to sustain their liquidity. People were accumulating coupons, rather than spending them and exchanging...

Why did Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and all the great philosophers know so little about the real world? Ever heard of Eddie Levert, Sammy Strain, Frank Little, Jr., and Walter Williams? The philosophizing soul brothers—the O’Jays crooned these words in For the Love of Money: Money, money, money, money, moneySome people got to have itSome people really need itListen to me, y’allDo things, do things, do things—bad things—with itYou want to do things, do things, do things—good things—with itTalk about cash money, moneyTalk about cash money, dollar...

The U.S. oil sector had its worst stretch under Ronald Reagan. So substantially did prices fall during his presidency that even his Vice President (George H.W. Bush) made the rather puzzling suggestion that OPEC should be prodded to restrain oil prices from further decline.  When markets are untouched by the powers that be, the unpredictable often follows. Reagan de-controlled gasoline prices in one of his first official acts as president, and the response was that the former actor was naïve. Ted Kennedy leaned on Democrats to oppose Reagan given his view that gasoline prices sans...

When it comes to medical tech and innovation, the United States remains the global leader in a new study by the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP). American leadership in cancer treatment, solutions for autoimmune diseases, gene editing, and vaccine development with regulatory approval, keeps the U.S. competitive in healthcare. However, the U.S. slips to 7th place worldwide when you factor in fiscal sustainability and choice — a reminder that conditions could worsen for U.S. healthcare.  In 2022, the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)...