RealClearMarkets Articles

Opportunities to spend other people’s money are a joy, and a fortiori when the goals being pursued are political and thus guaranteed to elicit applause from the right-minded at all the right cocktail parties. This is a substantial problem for corporate governance, as proposals presented for shareholder votes often have little to do with business operations that in principle are supposed to maximize shareholder value, that is, the economic value of investments in the given company.  Instead, many such proposals are blatantly political: environmental (reductions in...

Professor Hanson has had it with economists. We are a “doctrinaire” group of supposed scholars. We fawn over “free trade.” (Anyone, such as this author, who places scare quotes around about the phase depicting this system, has to be watched carefully. This institution, favored by Adam Smith, has done more for the human race than perhaps any other institution known to man). Hanson’s main objection to this system is what he characterizes as “unfair trade.” And by this he points to when one country racks up “massive mercantilist surpluses,”...

“I didn’t get better on his steady dose of antibiotics, the constant pain didn’t go away — while the advice to go off antibiotics entirely led to disasters, where I stopped the drugs and disintegrated quickly.” That's what New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote about his painful and long battle with Lyme Disease. Though some are lucky enough to recover quickly from the malady, others don’t. Douthat’s passage was plainly awful, and readers no doubt know other people personally who suffered a recovery like Douthat’s. There’s no way of...

The 2026 Major League Baseball season is the 151st season since the National League began play in 1876. It offers a useful way to think about disparities. One disparity stands out at once: baseball talent is not spread across the states in proportion to population. Using all players who made their MLB debut between 2020 and 2025, I compare each state’s actual number of debuting players with the number expected from that state’s share of births in the relevant cohorts. I then calculate an actual-to-expected ratio. A value above one means a state produced more players than expected....

The idea that defense spending should somehow be a consistent percentage of GDP is as fallacious as it is wasteful. Consider a recent Washington Post editorial. It oddly asserted that “Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. consistently spent more than 5 percent of GDP on its military.” The editorial’s point, and also lament, was that defense spending “hasn’t reached that level in decades, hovering around 3 percent in recent years.”   Without getting into what an impressively awful number GDP is as a measure of anything, that defense spending as a...

There is a four-letter word quietly sabotaging engagement, trust, and hope in our workplaces. It shows up in interviews, emails, meetings, and performance conversations. It sounds harmless. Efficient, even, but it’s not. The word is just. “I just need you to…” “We just need to move up this timeline.” “I just need the deck done by…”  But just is rarely just. Early in my career, I learned this the hard way. I was interviewing for my first executive role at a large organization. The final interview was with a new...

The 2010 Dodd-Frank financial “reform” bill may be tied with Obamacare as the most destructive piece of legislation passed between 2009-2011, when Democrats controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress. The legislation codified the “too big to fail” doctrine and imposed costly regulations on the financial sector. These regulations hit small banks the hardest, causing many of them to merge with big banks and thus increasing concentration in the banking industry. If that weren’t bad enough, Dodd-Frank also created a new...

Gasoline prices have surged since conflict broke out in the Middle East between Iran and the U.S., with the former escalating its attacks on oil tankers and infrastructure in the region. President Trump just waived the 106-yr-old Jones Act to help alleviate the subsequent pain at the pump, a law which really belongs in the scrap bin of history. Intended to maintain a strong domestic maritime industry, the Jones Act requires goods shipped between American ports to be transported on vessels that are built, owned, flagged, and crewed by the U.S. No other comparably stringent...

Budgetary experts have been promising us a future “crisis” related to the national debt for years, and in some instances, decades. If you’re reading this, you likely know some of their names: MacGuineas, Riedl, Galston, Bourne, Boccia, Jenkins, Rampell, and even Musk. To say the list is truncated insults understatement. Without much exaggeration, you could fill a Rose Bowl with all the economists, pundits and politicians who’ve long associated “national debt” with “disaster” and “crisis.” The unfortunate news for the myriad...

Behind every hyperscale data centre lies a global free market of energy, copper, and logistics that must be discussed just as much as artificial intelligence. The Hidden Supply Chain Powering the AI Revolution The AI boom sweeping across the United States is one of the most consequential economic developments of our lifetimes. It promises to transform medicine, commerce, and communication on a scale that very few people are seriously grappling with. Most of the commentary focuses on software: the models, the breakthroughs, the jobs that will exist or cease to exist. Far fewer people are...

More than a year into President Trump’s second term, most of the Biden administration’s aggressive antitrust agenda has been rolled back. But one major case remains: the Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit against Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits. It is one of — and arguably the very last of — the leftover Neo-Brandeisian Lina Khan cases still on the FTC’s docket. Ending it would finally close the book on an era that treated low prices and business efficiency as suspect, saving taxpayers tens of millions in litigation...

“You can’t ever take your eyes off them.” That's what parents tell would-be parents about parenting: it’s constant.  Which is arguably what makes parenting so fulfilling: the work. Fulfillment and joy are a mirror into the endless effort and frequent exhaustion that parenting implies. The deep meaning of parenting comes to mind as South Carolina legislators consider HB 4591, the Stop Harm From Addictive Social Media Act. Among other things, the bill would require that social media platforms verify age of users, it would prohibit allegedly "addictive design...

The O’Hare Airport is important for more than just Chicago: As the busiest airport in the country and hub for the two largest airlines, it has a disproportionate impact on the national air system. Delays, cancellations, and missed connections there inevitably propagate across the country.  Its outsized importance is precisely why the Federal Aviation Administration’s new proposal to reduce overscheduled flights at O’Hare is so important and welcome. It is a commonsense intervention aimed at preventing chaos before it starts. At issue is the...

The Trump administration is urgently moving to bring down energy prices. From releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to considering temporary waivers of the Jones Act, the White House is signaling that stabilizing fuel costs and ensuring reliable energy supply are top priorities.Those efforts reflect a basic reality: energy affordability underpins the broader American economy. When oil, gasoline, diesel, and electricity prices rise, the effects ripple through manufacturing, agriculture, transportation, and household budgets.But even as the administration takes steps to increase...

Lately, PJM, the regional electric grid manager that connects 13 states and the District of Colombia, has been in the news but for all the wrong reasons. Stretching from the Carolinas to Chicago, PJM’s core problem is that customers who live and work inside its footprint are facing higher electric bills, and there are no plausible solutions that will provide ratepayers relief anytime soon.  PJM was created in the early 1920s, but its current construct took shape about 25 years ago during the energy deregulation movement that swept the country.  There were many rationales for...

Today - Part 2 of a discussion with Garrett Gregory, who spent a dozen years as an IRS attorney in its Office of Chief Counsel before founding  Dallas-based Gregory Law Group, focused solely on tax law and IRS enforcement actions. What’s The Current State of the IRS and What Can Be Done About It? Bruce Willey: It feels like the IRS has been under siege over the past few years. Let’s start with how you see what the IRS is up against here in 2026. Garrett Gregory: The biggest challenge for the IRS, and it's probably always been the case, is keeping up with...

The U.S. dollar's role as the world's reserve currency is often portrayed as an "exorbitant privilege" granting America endless benefits like cheap borrowing and global clout. Career economists fill books and panels with this narrative, implying dollar dominance is a perpetual free lunch. But common sense reveals a simpler truth: The dollar's power stems 90% from U.S. economic fundamentals—scale, stability, productivity—with reserve perks adding modest, often net-neutral gains that balance out across society. Disproportionate Wealth, Modest Perks America's household net worth...

If you've heard that "real" inflation is under 1 percent and the Federal Reserve is wildly overreacting, you can thank a little-known website called Truflation. Pundits are pouncing on its numbers to claim prices are up barely a third of what the official Consumer Price Index (CPI) shows. Truflation even says prices declined by nearly 1 percent since mid-September—a drop CPI indicates only occurred twice since World War II. Unfortunately, Truflation gets three things dangerously wrong: what inflation statistics measure, housing costs, and...

“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.” Words spoken by Robert E. Lee as he watched James Longstreet’s First Corps (Army of Northern Virginia) decimate the Yankee army as it attacked his defensive position on Marye’s Heights on December 14, 1862. Twelve thousand Union casualties—dead bodies everywhere. Dad stormed the beaches at Normandy, fought in the Normandy hedgerows, and helped liberate Paris. There, the Army made him an officer. During the Battle of the Bulge and the freezing cold, he and his men repulsed the...