RealClearMarkets Articles

Those who reduce the talks at the World Economic Forum (Davos) to bloviations evidently haven’t witnessed the last two speeches by Argentina president Javier Milei, or for that matter the commentary of JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. In Davos last week, Dimon pithily explained how legislation in the U.S. should be crafted. Though properly critical of President Trump’s decision to join Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in legislation meant to cap credit card interest rates at 10 percent, Dimon added a slight but crucial wrinkle to Trump, Sanders and Warren’s allegedly...

In Stanley Kubrick’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, the HAL 9000 computer did not go rogue and kill the entire crew except one because it was evil in any sense. Rather, the operators threatened the mission. They were a variable. He optimized them out. For half a century this was dismissed as cinematic melodrama, and damned good melodrama at that. Who can forget that soft-spoken “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” But now sci-fi may be becoming sci-fact. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a general-purpose optimizer. And when optimizers grow...

Experts too easily forget that “government spending” is a benign way of describing central planning of precious resources.   Which means it fails repeatedly. Rich as the U.S. presently is, we’re a fraction as rich as we could be if the federal government weren’t such a size allocator of wealth not its own. It recalls a recent post by Kite & Key Media, a very good and very effective right-of-center producer of economics videos. They weren’t so great last week. In a video about federal spending cleverly titled “The High Cost of the...

“Stop the Netflix Cultural Takeover” So ran the headline of an op-ed posted to Truth Social by President Donald Trump on January 11. Netflix, the thinking goes, has acquired too commanding a market position to be allowed to buy media conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery, despite fierce competition among streaming services. In such a competitive market, it is the shareholders of WBD, not the president or some middle manager in his administration, who should decide whether the deal moves forward. For nearly five decades, American antitrust enforcement has rightly operated...

President Trump’s Executive Order to ban institutional investors from purchasing single family homes gets the equation backward. The real problem in America’s housing market may not be too many institutional investors—but too few. In his January 21 speech in Davos, President Trump reiterated his desire to prevent these investors from competing with families for homes. It’s a response to an understandable concern about the state of the single-family housing market that he inherited. During the Biden administration, home prices went up by 34%...

The snowstorm has rendered driving in DC nearly impossible. But looking at the Senate calendar, maybe that’s a good thing. If Wednesday’s hearing on concert ticket prices gets cancelled, it would save Congress from wasting a chunk of taxpayers’ time. As a result of negative headlines surrounding artists — such as Taylor Swift — having notably high ticket prices in the secondary market (yes, often exceeding face value), Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn will chair a hearing before the Consumer Protection, Technology, and Data Privacy Subcommittee. The hearing...

Generic drugs are the rare part of American health care that actually drives down costs. In 2024, they accounted for 90 percent of all prescriptions filled in the United States yet accounted for only twelve percent of prescription drug spending.  That massive divergence in volume versus cost underlines the simple fact that the price competition engendered by generic drugs dramatically drives down prices and delivers savings to patients, employers, and taxpayers. Generic drugs contain the same active ingredients as brand-name medications but are sold under their common...

The Trump administration has made its position on biological reality crystal clear. On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed an Executive Order on "Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government." That order explicitly states that it is the policy of the United States to "recognize two sexes, male and female," grounded in "fundamental and incontrovertible reality." It defines "sex" as an "immutable biological classification" and declares that "woman" means "adult … human females." Furthermore, the administration has committed...

Over the past several years, Americans have watched the cost of everyday life climb faster than their paychecks. Since 2020, overall consumer prices have risen by roughly 25%, while household electricity prices have increased even faster, especially in certain regions of the country. Energy is no longer a background expense. It is a front-line affordability issue, shaping the cost of everything from groceries and housing to manufacturing and data services. At the same time, U.S. power demand is surging due to the rapid growth of AI and data center infrastructure, the reshoring of...

Affordability is emerging as the defining economic challenge facing the next Congress and housing sits squarely at the center of the affordability problem. For younger families in particular, the gap between incomes and home prices has turned what once felt achievable into something perpetually out of reach. That is why the Trump administration’s focus on housing supply matters. Streamlining permitting, pushing back against exclusionary zoning, and making homebuilding a national priority are the right moves. Bill Pulte, the director of Federal Housing Finance Agency,...

As the Senate Commerce Committee turns its attention to live event ticketing, there’s one thing nearly everyone agrees on: the system should work better for fans. Too often, fans feel confused, frustrated, or shut out entirely. Lawmakers should be careful, however, not to mistake convenient scapegoats for real causes. Blaming ticket resale for all problems in ticketing is a stretch. Significant harm to fans originate at the source in the currently rigged system dominated by a single, vertically integrated company that maintains a powerful grip over event promotion, artist...

Parenting has always been about choices. What we teach. What we model. What we allow into our homes. Today, those choices increasingly flow through a screen. For modern parents, the digital world is not a supplement to childhood—it is part of childhood. Games, videos, and apps now shape how children think, learn, and understand right and wrong long before they can articulate those concepts themselves. That reality places an enormous burden on parents to decide not just how much screen time their children get, but what kind of world that screen invites them into. One option is to hand...

There were “lines for everything” in the former Soviet Union. That’s what Hedrick Smith conveyed to rapt readers in his 1976 book, The Russians. As frustrated Americans endured long waits for price-controlled gasoline in the 1970s, Smith reminded Americans of how good they had it through Russians for whom shopping was an endless, frequently fruitless exercise. That is, unless they had “blat,” which was a Russian word for access to goods (including Western items) only available in shops accessible to a small elite. Blat comes to mind amid an ongoing debate...

America’s private retirement system is one of the great successes of a market-based economy.  Employer-sponsored retirement plans have helped millions of workers build long-term financial security thanks to the strength and resilience of our capital markets.  But our retirement system is under growing strain from abusive litigation and regulatory overreach.  A key component of the retirement system is the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA).  That law in part regulates the responsibilities of private-sector employers providing retirement...

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...