RealClearMarkets Articles

Members of Gen Z won’t just benefit from the genius of artificial intelligence (AI) throughout their careers, they’ll also benefit from a federal government thankfully hamstrung by past spending errors. Lucky Gen Z. Mindless as Social Security and Medicare are, and economically damaging as they were, they’ll spare those entering the working world now from all sorts of new government spending in all sorts of areas that government shouldn’t be involved in. This lack of expansive government spending will be great for young Americans, and by extension great for the U.S....

You own Apple. At least, that is what your brokerage app tells you. If your zero-commission broker collapses tomorrow morning, you cannot simply transfer that fractional position to safety. It is not transferable in kind. It must be liquidated, back to the same balance sheet that is failing. You do not hold a share. You hold a claim. The difference is not semantic. In 2008, Lehman Brothers' clients learned the devastating difference between holding property and holding a contractual claim against a bankrupt entity. Today, that same vulnerability has been engineered into the portfolios of...

This summer, millions of graduates will face prolonged unemployment or underemployment in a frozen labor market – not because their degrees are inherently useless, but because employers no longer need the knowledge and skills they spent years developing. The real problem with higher education today is not access, cost, or quality, but its timing. Each year, college freshmen are required to make long-term decisions about their education with little information about their strengths as job seekers, or the labor market they will eventually enter. Majors and coursework are often decided at...

Spirit Airlines shut down before dawn on May 2, 2026, two years after the Biden Justice Department blocked the merger that would have saved it and weeks after a $500 million federal rescue collapsed in negotiations with bondholders. The cabin crew and gate agents who lost their jobs when the airline stopped flying were reduced to a GoFundMe to pay their bills. The 46 percent of national ultra-low-cost airline capacity that anchored the lawsuit is sitting on tarmacs in Fort Lauderdale and Orlando, waiting to be sold for parts. Spirit's former passengers will fly Delta, American, and United...

Stablecoins regulation reminds me of the classic Western, McClintock, in which John Wayne referees a fight. Wayne demonstrates the behavior he won’t allow by inflicting blows of various kinds on the bruiser about to pummel his young friend. The friend gets knocked out anyway. Similarly, despite crippling legislation and punishing regulation by the OCC, I expect stablecoins still will prosper as a payment technology. That’s how bad the politically protected status quo is, and how promising stablecoins are. But it will take a lot longer than it should, due to crooked...

Joe Biden drove American manufacturing offshore. Donald Trump is bringing it back.  That is the unmistakable message in the latest Institute for Supply Management manufacturing report.   In May, the ISM manufacturing index breached the magic 50 mark for the fifth straight month, signaling expansion across America’s factory floor. The latest reading came in at a robust 54.0 — the highest level since May 2022 and comfortably above expectations.  This is not noise. This is a trend. New orders rose to 56.8. Production remained in expansion at 54.3. Supplier...

People power economic growth, but declining global birth rates are a bullish phenomenon. Yes, both statements are true. If declining birth rates foretold economic decline as Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle believes, stock markets in countries like South Korea would be experiencing sickening collapses. That’s because South Korea has the world’s lowest birth rate in concert with the highest suicide rate. Except that the forward looking KOSPI Index surged 75% over the past year, while narrower AI and semiconductor sectors are up 200%. The reality is that poor countries...

Some suggest the conservatism of Ronald Reagan is over. Somewhere in the past 40 years, they argue, limited government and free-market capitalism were traded for welfare and industrial policy — just with a red coat of paint. Various organizations and online activists insist the American right is drifting toward the ideas of progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren or the state-directed model embraced by Viktor Orbán’s failed governing coalition in Hungary. But last week’s meeting of over 200 conservative and libertarian policy leaders in Washington’s Navy Yard for...

The race to dominate artificial intelligence is the defining competition of our era. The country that leads in AI will lead the world in economic output, military strength, and technological innovation for decades to come. President Trump understands this. His administration revoked the Biden-era executive order on AI, rescinded the heavy-handed AI Diffusion Rule, and has committed to an “America First” strategy that puts U.S. companies and allies first. But a problem persists. Despite the President’s clear directive, unelected career bureaucrats—holdovers from the...

Britain is already a case study on what happens when governments interfere with markets.  Now, their Labor government is thinking about giving the world a refresher course. The U.S. has economically outperformed the U.K. for over a century.  U.S. GDP per capita overtook the U.K.’s early in the 20th century and there have been few interruptions since.  From 2007-2024, the U.S. has outgrown the U.K. across the board.  Looking at arguably the most consequential indicators, GDP per capita and wealth per capita: From 2007-2024 in the U.S., GDP per capita increased 72% and...

The great Warren Brookes (1928-1991) joked in The Economy In Mind about the return of an economist from overseas, and a quip from a U.S. Passport official about perhaps not letting him back into the United States. Something about the damage done by economists. Edmund Phelps, who died two weeks ago, would have likely passed muster with Brookes. Among other things, Phelps had long ago made a case for the correlation between individuals working more the less they were taxed. Just the same, Phelps might not have gotten past the passport official. The PhD disease sometimes clouded his wise mind....

There is a perennial worry among economists that the much celebrated capacity of the U.S. to produce innovation is about to have run its course. Joseph Schumpeter, the most influential historic voice to have explained America’s decades-long economic expansion, noted that upon the widespread adoption of electricity in the 1920’s and 30’s, many theorists believed they had seen the “exhaustion of technical possibilities.” This idea was commonly used to explain the Great Depression.   The story that America could lose its cutting edge in innovation arose again...

The legal principle dominating Supreme Court jurisprudence in recent decades known as the anti-commandeering doctrine, holds that the Constitution, in particular the Tenth Amendment, bars Congress from forcing state governments to enforce federal law, including federal tax law. Yet congressional Republicans are now advancing a bill that seeks to do just that, with the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s May 22 passage of H.R. 8870, legislation that would institute a $150 yearly federal tax on electric vehicles (EVs) and a $50 tax on plug-in hybrids. The bill...

When President Trump was first sworn in, he made a promise: The forgotten men and women of America would be forgotten no longer. Since then, this Administration has worked hard to deliver on that commitment, from reshoring manufacturing and bringing jobs back to America, to preparing our workforce for the AI revolution. But while our economy is seeing record job growth, too often one group is still forgotten: Americans with disabilities. That’s changing. As we mark May 29—or 529Day—the Department of Labor is taking a moment...

The federal permitting system no longer protects the environment. It has become a weapon of delay and obstruction. What started in 1970 as a simple review process under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) now operates as a multi-year barrier of endless studies, repeated reviews, and constant lawsuits.This is not true environmental protection. This is regulatory failure. It blocks opportunity for American workers, plus raises costs for families. The evidence is clear and overwhelming. Major infrastructure, energy, and industrial projects often take four to seven years — or...

Detroit’s existing workers weren’t harmed by a global influx of people in pursuit of Henry Ford’s $5/daily wage. The impressive pay Ford offered as a way of shrinking employee turnover logically added to the productivity of Detroit’s existing workforce, and by extension their ability to earn even more. That’s because people are never a cost, they're an input. The more hands at work in the production of market goods, the more worker elevation born of specialization. The guess here is that American Institute for Economic Research economist Julia Cartwright would...

Investors have spent the last two years trying to buy any piece of Anthropic they could find. Now some are discovering that exposure to one of Silicon Valley’s hottest private companies may come with far less control, transparency, or enforceable ownership than they assumed. Anthropic’s decision Monday to crack down on secondary-market transactions rattled private investors, hit publicly-traded funds tied to the company, and raised an uncomfortable question: do some investors actually own what they thought they owned?  It also highlighted a bigger issue as Anthropic moves...

"If one-half of the commodities in the market rise in exchange value, the very terms imply a fall of the other half; and reciprocally, the fall implies a rise." – John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, p. 419 Government is an ass. Human action taking place free of government control exceeds its opposite. AEI’s Mark Perry would broadly agree with the previous paragraph, if not its tone. As Perry’s “Chart of the Century” indicates, prices in sectors defined by less government slope downward, versus upward sloping prices in sectors where...

A new poll shows that the overwhelming majority of Americans think federal taxes are too high.  A record 70% of voters now think that the taxes they pay are too high, the highest level since the question was first asked two decades ago.Large numbers of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents are fed up with high taxes for one simple reason—-taxes are in fact too high.  Total federal revenues have doubled since 2012.  Individual income taxes are up more than 100%.  Corporate taxes are up nearly as much.The Republican tax cuts, which every Democrat in the House and...