RealClearMarkets Articles

On the last day of August, Washington officials released two reports related to the quest for American energy dominance. The first is a White House fact sheet detailing a major partnership between the United States and the Venezuelan oil industry. The second, a report to Congress prepared at the request of Energy Secretary Chris Wright by the advisory National Petroleum Council, is a call to action for the U.S. government and industry to invest in new, more effective subsurface intelligence technology. Better subsurface intelligence – “eyes underground” – is crucial to...

Cognitive Distortion: Believing an Unverified Future as Present Reality Excessive market volatility does not begin with asset prices; it begins with human illusion. What, then, fuels these economic illusions? Why do alarmist narratives inevitably rear their heads whenever market expectations grow oversized? And why do factions attempting to profit by artificially intensifying market debates never disappear? An economic illusion is not merely the presence of future expectations. It is a fundamental cognitive distortion that occurs the moment an unverified future is embraced as an established,...

In mid-August President Trump reposted a column by Steve Cortes celebrating a “quiet manufacturing boom.”I’ve owned and operated a manufacturing company for 21 years, and I helped develop the External Revenue Service concept this administration adopted, as the Wall Street Journal reported in January 2025. I’m still trying to believe this administration can make America the manufacturing superpower of the world again. And that’s exactly why the numbers this “boom” rests on deserve a harder look. Steve Cortes seems to agree, saying, “it’s...

There’s only one billionaire in Vermont. No wonder the government there is so small. To which more than a few might reasonably reply that there’s no way government could be small in Vermont. After all, this is the deep blue state that elected a socialist in Bernie Sanders as one of its U.S. Senators. Except that Vermont’s government is small. Its most recent state budget was $9.3 billion, and the state’s debt is $7 billion. Some might point out that Vermont’s government is sizable relative to its small population, but the fact remains that relative to other U.S....

Washington may have discovered the limits of economic warfare. In the Bishkek economic summit, from 31st August to 1st September, China, Russia, India and Iran gathered under the banner of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) while the United States continued its campaign to squeeze Tehran. The symbolism was difficult to miss. The more Washington reaches for sanctions, the more determined its rivals become to construct financial channels beyond American control. The proposed Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Development Bank is still some...

To understand a story now gripping the technology world, namely the Hugging Face Incident, start with a simple thought experiment. Imagine giving the smartest teenage boy you know a test and saying, “I want you to get the highest score possible!” You expect hard work, ingenuity and perhaps an all-night study session. What you don’t expect is for him to hack into the school’s computer system, recruit a bunch of nerdy friends, give himself administrator privileges, and build a private message board so the adults can’t interrupt while he and his pals root around in...

Like most boys, I idolized my father, and with good reason. He was always the big man in the room. His energy was pervasive, filling every nook and cranny. Not just a big, but a HUGE, fun-loving personality. What made him truly unique was the other side of him: he was really smart. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell told folks that Marston Smith had the keenest mind of anyone he knew. Dad’s quick rhetorical and oratory skills were bar none. His intellectual love was the law. He had an extreme curiosity for practical matters—public policy, business, technology; he knew the science...

For more than a century, Perrier sold something much more valuable than sparkling water. It sold provenance. The distinctive green bottle represented natural mineral water from a particular place in France, with a particular mineral composition and history. Consumers did not need to study the label to understand what they were buying. The name Perrier itself conveyed the product. That kind of recognition is one of the most valuable assets a consumer-products company can own. It takes decades to create, costs enormous sums to replicate and rarely appears on a balance sheet at anything...

There’s a saying in Vegas, the house always wins. I represented Nevada in Congress for more than a decade and I can attest to the truth behind that phrase. But what I learned is that it's rarely a fair fight. The gaming industry works to stack the odds against competition, whether it's at the tables, in courtrooms, or in the halls of Congress. It was never a fair fight, which is why the gaming industry is so worried about prediction markets. Prediction markets are far from perfect, but they're fair. There is no house. It's no wonder the gambling industry is working overtime to stop...

The Justice Department’s Antitrust Division approved the Paramount-Warner Brothers merger in June. However, the merger must still survive a lawsuit brought by 12 state attorneys general, led by California Attorney General Rob Bona. The attorneys are arguing that the $110 billion merger would increase concentration in the film industry by reducing the number of major film studios to four (Disney, Sony, Universal, and Paramount-Warner Brothers). The state attorneys general also argue that if Warner Brothers is allowed to merge with Paramount the resulting company will control 59% of the...

Everyone at Yale thinks they’ll eventually be president. Harvard is no different. This is worth remembering as Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy questions whether he should allow his daughter to attend Harvard. In Duffy’s words to his daughter, the Ivy League schools “have professionalized figuring out how they can take good young girls like you and corrupt their minds.” Duffy’s expression of worry amounts to non sequitur. See this opinion piece’s opening. Those smart enough to be accepted at Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, and schools like the ones...

Anthropic was expected to make its IPO paperwork public by the end of August, capping a confidential filing it made with the SEC back in June, with a listing eyed for September or October. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are reportedly lining up buyers around a $965 billion baseline from the company's last funding round, with some bankers already talking trillions once the stock trades. The pitch underneath that number is even bigger: a total addressable market north of $30 trillion, roughly the size of the American economy, calculated not from software sales...

As Washington weighs how to regulate artificial intelligence, it is worth revisiting a classic question in political economy: why did the Spanish Empire — the world’s largest and richest state in 1600 — decline into oblivion by 1900, while plucky England ascended to liberal democracy, industrialization, and world superpower status in the same time frame? According to the economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson, the answer lies in Albion’s relative lack of monopoly.  For centuries, the Spanish port town of Seville monopolized the...

Kevin Warsh has spent his first months as Federal Reserve chairman trying to get investors to stop watching him and start watching the data. "Market participants are learning to play the ball, not the referee," he said this month. Scott Bessent apparently didn't get the memo. The same week, the Treasury secretary doubled the ceiling on Treasury's long-bond buybacks, to $4 billion an operation, in a direct attempt to push long yields lower. Evercore ISI's Krishna Guha summed up the awkwardness of it: "activist Treasury policy is as material, for good and for bad, as central bank policy." Two...

The U.S.-Korea bilateral relationship is teetering. Just last month, President Donald Trump announced unprecedented troop reductions in Korea and Korea’s President Lee responded by calling for military independence. Meanwhile, American companies operating in-country are being shown the door, after being shaken down in the foyer.  Wall Street should be paying closer attention, because the money being lost is American.  On July 1, the House Judiciary Committee released a report documenting South Korea’s systematic discrimination against U.S. companies....

Donald Trump is playing to a conservative tune in Venezuela. Which speaks to how much conservatism has changed. To see why, pivot to Hong Kong. American conservatives long revered it. And not just because its gleaming skyline born of rampant free market policies existed as one of the ultimate rebuttals of market skeptics on the left. Arguably just as appealing to philosophical conservatives was that the “barren rock” vivified the genius of the metaphysical over the physical. Exactly because Hong Kong had no natural resources of the steel, oil and cobalt variety, government had...

The August jobs report delivered a message the Wall Street commentariat keeps missing: Trumpnomics is working, and nowhere is that clearer than in manufacturing.  Nonfarm payrolls rose by 162,000 in August, nearly triple market expectations. June and July were revised up by another 55,000 jobs. Private payrolls rose by 127,000. The unemployment rate held at a low 4.1 percent. The labor-force participation rate rose to 61.6 percent.  That is not a recession report. It is not a stagflation report. It is not a report that justifies another Federal Reserve rate hike.  It is a...

President Ronald Reagan famously described Washington politicians’ solutions to every problem as “if it moves, tax it.”  That is exactly what many in Washington today want to do with artificial intelligence. As Wall Street Journal chief economic commentator Greg IP wrote recently, a growing number of experts believe there is “a simple answer to AI job losses.”  Tax it.  His column described a petition signed by 1,000 economists, including 17 Nobel laureates, pleading for higher taxes on AI to prevent “large scale” job...

Two competing crypto-blockbusters are showing through mid-September. The political drama Clarity Act, a single-screen showing at the Congress venue on Capitol Hill, is about a group of Democratic Senators who must decide whether to support a federal regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies. On a much broader release, “screens” across the country are showing the courtroom drama Kalshi vs Attorneys General through at least November. This sleeper hit has a bunch of lesser-known actors – but the plot is high-concept – whether federal or state regulators...