RealClearMarkets Articles

The Peter Peterson Foundation is one of many organizations in Washington that have been formed to build support for deficit reduction solutions. These groups, often called “deficit hawks,” issue papers and hold seminars on ways to reduce deficits and debt.Unfortunately, the Peterson Foundation, like most of the other deficit groups, believes that a “key driver” of budget deficits is “insufficient revenues,” and that taxes should be increased to “cover federal spending.” What is worse, they support tax increases that would be most harmful to...

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott has a new tag team partner in his efforts to combat the inappropriate debanking of conservatives: Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina. Tillis has introduced a comprehensive bill that includes and expands on Scott's proposed legislation to end debanking based on so-called reputational risk.  The committee may soon hold hearings on the issue, and both senators deserve credit for taking on the thorny problem of political interference in financial access. Tillis's "Ensuring Fair Access to Banking Act" broadens the conversation on how to protect...

With Netflix's proposed acquisition of Warner Bros., old fears have come back to life: consolidation threatens competition, monopoly looms, and only aggressive antitrust enforcement can save consumers. It's the same narrative we heard when AT&T purchased Time Warner in 2018—a deal that critics insisted would harm the market. Within a few years, the market self-corrected, and AT&T divested the assets at a loss. The supposed crisis never materialized. Senator Elizabeth Warren calls the Netflix deal "an anti-monopoly nightmare," while Republican Senator Mike Lee says it raises more...

One of my brothers just called to tell me that Rebecca Coggin died, which of course saddened me.As my readers know, I’m a mean old snake, an unrepentant sinner, and a thoroughly bad apple. But every now and then I get hit by a wave of sentimentality—indeed, one might call it romanticism—thinking about a world that no longer exists.I’ve never understood why so many people have such negative feelings about their childhoods and blame their parents for emotional trauma that lingers throughout their lives. Maybe I was just unusually lucky, but the older I get, the more...

Balanced budget orthodoxy in the United States will keep the poorest parts of the U.S. relatively impoverished. And not because of reduced federal spending. Quite the opposite. Peter Bauer (1915-2002), a Hungarian-born British economist, and winner of the libertarian Cato Institute’s first Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, would know why. Bauer was awarded by Cato for his foreign aid work. He showed that recipients of it didn’t prosper from it. Which, when you think about it, really isn’t surprising. No individual, no business, and no government ever runs out of...

The Federal Reserve is on track to post its first systemwide profit since the fourth quarter of 2022. Since September, 2022, the combined expenses of the 12 Federal Reserve district banks and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (BOG) have exceeded the system’s combined income. The Fed has accounted for these losses by accumulating balances in a unique account—“Earnings Remittances due the U.S. Treasury”. The Fed describes this “magic asset” as the cumulative amount of net earnings the system must generate and retain before it will resume paying...

Whenever a survey of professional economists is taken so as to unearth consensus, or the lack thereof, they are typically united on three things: minimum wages cause unemployment for unskilled workers, rent control ruins the residential rental housing market, and, of relevance in the present case, free markets enhance economic welfare and tariffs are uneconomical. On this latter issue, according to google: “Yes, there is a strong consensus among economists that free trade benefits the overall economy, a view supported by economists since Adam Smith. However, this consensus is often at...

The delegates at COP30 in Belém did something overdue: they put water closer to the center of the climate conversation.That’s welcome — and it should be a wake-up call for entrepreneurs and investors.Water is no longer an environmental or humanitarian “nice to have.” It is the elixir of life and the critical infrastructure of economies, food systems and cities. And as governments and climate funds move to finance large projects, there is a clear commercial pathway for for-profit companies to deliver scalable, resilient water solutions while earning market...

Falling test scores signal rising prosperity. The declines that have pundits up in arms are a signal of a much better future precisely because they signal soaring individual specialization. Which requires a brief digression. In last week’s opinion piece about the scandalous fact that algebra is still taught in schools centuries after they began teaching it, it was predicted that falling math aptitude among UCSD students would surely elicit lots of commentary from the right about American decline. They didn’t disappoint. The Wall Street Journal’s Alyssia Finley wrote...

President Trump is happily overstepping the naivete that informs so much economic commentary. While the experts continue to look to the Federal Reserve to bring down prices via the tweaking of interest rates, Trump wisely chose to provide reciprocal tariff relief for so-called “unavailable natural resources,” e.g., agricultural products that cannot be grown at commercial scale in the U.S. (tropical fruit, coffee, tea, spices). About the steps taken by the President, true nirvana would be the White House decreeing Americans free to trade with whomever they want, without regard to...

U.S. Postal Service workers used to be able to afford Manhattan’s Upper East Side. When a young Lee Harvey Oswald moved with his mother Marguerite to New York City in 1952, they lived for a time with Marguerite’s postman son, Lee Harvey’s half-brother, on East 92nd Street. The oddity of a postman living where doctors, investment bankers and lawyers live now speaks to the so-called “affordability problem” that Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani ran on, but it more optimistically indicates the source of New York City’s lack of affordability: an enormous influx of...

As we approach the first quarter of 2026, gold is not just glimmering — it’s flashing an urgent signal to investors: diversify now, while momentum remains strong.  With multiple top-tier institutions projecting dramatic gains and global macro trends favoring safe-haven assets, now may be one of the best windows in decades to allocate to gold — and to consider expanding beyond traditional channels into alternative bullion investments. In recent weeks, several major banks and analysts have significantly upgraded their gold price forecasts. Deutsche Bank now expects gold...

Australia’s green energy experiment has left millions of its citizens with a shaky power grid, serving as a case study on how blind allegiance to climate dogma leads to economic and social turmoil.  The once sacred “net zero” pledge has been exposed as a curse producing public anger, stark warnings from industry and a rethinking of national energy policy. Cracks in the so-called consensus about human-caused global warming are widening. Last week, the National Party of Australia finally broke the spell. By unanimously voting to abandon a 2050 net zero target, party...

Investment professionals who work on Wall Street may be in need of grief counseling—or at least a hug and a strong drink—as they try to cope with the fallout from November’s New York City mayoral election. It is not just that self-proclaimed democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani will soon occupy the Mayor’s office; it is also that he appointed former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan to his transition team. Khan’s tenure at the FTC was marked by the abandonment of the “consumer welfare standard,” which judges a business's actions by...

In his recently released memoir, Born To Be Wired, John Malone writes of attending the 1979 Western Show out in Anaheim, CA. What the TCI CEO witnessed fascinated him, but also terrified him. It was a proliferation of television stations sprouting up to meet the needs of a still small, but growing cable TV subscriber base. Think ESPN, Nickelodeon, HBO, etc. Malone’s realization was that the cable companies with “scale” would be the winners in a still young industry. He immediately returned to Denver to figure out how to grow TCI even faster. Malone’s glimpse into the...

Social scientists tell us that men think about sex 99.9728% of the time. The remaining 0.0272% occurs immediately after sex, when their only thought is how quickly they can exit the scene. Women, on the other hand, live in a different universe entirely. Their minds juggle roughly 400 simultaneous thoughts—many unnecessary, most contradictory. “I wonder if I should wear my Lilly Pulitzer dress to the Thompsons’ July 4th party in 2029.” The eminent German social scientist Edison Von Megahertz once compared the female brain to a softball-sized knot of copper wire attached...

“The present increase in commerce is not to be attributed to ministers, or to any political contrivances, but to its own natural operations in consequence of peace.” The above insight is unoriginal; Thomas Paine felt it necessary to restate what should have been obvious to all—in 1792!  Centuries later, the fact that commerce is a natural consequence of peace seems even less obvious.  In the absence of conflict, voluntary exchange is as natural as breathing.  Suffocating is unnatural, and that is precisely what happens to people—“the...

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump pledged support for working Americans. This included a promise to end inflation, with specific assurances that grocery bills would fall and  energy prices would be halved. He promised no cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and protection for Medicaid. It further included a promise to protect jobs and reduce crime by stopping and/or deporting illegal immigrants, as well as to protect domestic jobs and pay down our debt with tariffs.  A quick look at the data tells us promises were...

“Bob and I had no idea of any of the potential back then.” Those are the words of cable television visionary John Malone in his recently released memoir, Born To Be Wired. Malone was writing about Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI) “hanging coaxial cable across the country” in the early 1970s to provide rural areas with better television reception, but it didn’t occur to him or TCI founder Bob Magness that decades later the cable would be “the platform for the likes of Amazon, Facebook, and Google, and unlocking immense value in a new digital...