RealClearMarkets Articles

Fundamental principles do not change with the passage of time. Perhaps this is because we actively protect and manage them so they remain unyielding. While principles can be refined at the margins, their core must never be shaken. There can be no compromise or boundaries in upholding them. The Watergate scandal is a defining moment in American history that reaffirmed the principle that "not even the highest power stands above the law." The reason Americans judge this event as profoundly significant is that it salvaged a crumbling principle and reestablished a sacred boundary: it practically...

On June 26 the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission made a request that sounds like plain good sense. Antitrust cases drag on for years, Andrew Ferguson said, so the courts should rewrite their own rules and move them faster. Nobody rises to defend a five-year lawsuit, which is exactly why the idea deserves a second look. Because Ferguson named the price of speed himself. Getting monopoly cases "to move at the pace of merger cases," he allowed, might mean the parties "don't get to do 12 expert reports." That is not trimming delay. It is cutting the evidence, and it is most reckless in the...

I believe the Trump Administration made the right decision by not automatically renewing the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement this week. That shouldn't be viewed as a rejection of free trade. It should be viewed as an acknowledgment that trade agreements deserve stringent review. The purpose of these reviews is not to create uncertainty or political theater. It is to honestly evaluate whether an agreement negotiated years ago is still producing the outcomes it was intended to deliver for American workers, manufacturers, farmers, and small businesses. In other words, the review is not the...

The proposed merger of Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern is about life and death. Yes, you read that right. Which requires a brief digression.  Specifically, to Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump in 2016. Remember when partisans of both claimed the election would decide whether the U.S. went the way of Venezuela, or not?  Life or death in politics is generally a fraud, though it’s a device used by politicians and partisans alike. Elect me or my candidate to “save” the people from all manner of horrors. It’s nonsense, and it should be treated as...

Public sentiment regarding AI, and the data centers that drive it, is becoming increasingly negative, yet AI continues to receive trillions of dollars from investors on Wall Street and beyond. Despite the mind-blowing levels of investment, many policymakers don’t share the same enthusiasm, and in many cases, policy trends are moving the opposite direction. Recently, Seattle followed New York’s lead by imposing a one-year moratorium on new data centers. At the same time, Illinois and Arizona have halted tax incentives for new data centers. These actions aren’t...

The White House recently made a move that may leave many Americans wondering: wait, the federal government was still doing that? Under a recent executive order, the federal government began phasing out paper checks and moving payments to electronic systems. For a country that leads the world in technology and finance, the surprising part is not that Washington is modernizing. It is that it took this long. Paper checks have outlived their usefulness. More than three decades after online banking became routine, government payments, rent, refunds, and other routine transactions still...

Kroger, owner of several grocery chains and the country’s fourth largest retailer, recently announced it would be using digital tags in its stores. Kroger is following the lead of Walmart, the nation’s leading retailer. Walmart will soon be using digital labels in every one of its 4,600 locations. The adoption of digital tags has generated controversy because it facilities surveillance pricing, more accurately called personalized pricing. Personalized pricing involves the use of technology, including artificial intelligence, to analyze data such as shopping history, email sign...

A recent poll conducted for news organization Politico suggested that only 27 percent of Americans support the CLARITY Act, the bipartisan legislation moving through the Senate that would finally give digital assets a clear regulatory framework. The takeaway, delivered with a knowing Washington shrug: the industry may be winning inside the Capitol but actually lacks strong support outside the beltway. I'd like to follow the facts and offer a different read. The same week that poll landed, the National Cryptocurrency Association released its 2026 State of Crypto Holders Report,...

The people on the Mayflower were lower middle class, and largely British. Which means they were lower middle-class arrivals from a country that was very poor. As Niall Ferguson wrote in his 2004 book Empire, the England of the 17th century was far, far from the one of the 19th century. While economic measures are powerfully flawed on their best day, it’s notable that the England of the 17th century had an economy that was a quarter of India’s. Which is quite something as most who’ve been to India modernly will attest. Though it’s liberalized quite a lot in the last...

The Brookings Institution is a well-respected Washington public policy think tank which claims to offer nonpartisan research promoting economic growth and prosperity.  Its Hamilton Project also bills itself as a nonpartisan initiative offering proposals to grow the economy for all Americans. Unfortunately, their latest proposal is an anti-growth business tax plan which is widely out of step with corporate tax policy thinking around the world.  While most countries have reduced their corporate taxes to improve their ability to compete and grow their economy, Brookings is...

Stretching Scarce Authorizing Legislation as Far as Possible: A Legislative History of the 340B Drug Pricing Program, a new research paper published in The Milbank Quarterly, is the latest addition to the growing research strengthening the case for Section 340B reform. Created in 1992, Section 340B was added to the Public Health Service Act to, as the paper details, to correct an unintended consequence of a prior attempt by Congress to help low-income Americans: the Medicaid Drug Rebate Program (MDRP). Created in 1990, the MDRP requires pharmaceutical companies to provide state Medicaid...

America's 250th anniversary is upon us. We are, and have always been, a great country. Indeed, the greatest the world has ever seen. Two hundred and fifty years of back-to-back world championships! Our greatness started in 1607 at Jamestown. All across the colonies, an entrepreneurial spirit developed. This mindset was greatly aided by venerable British traditions and institutions, inviolate property rights, English common law, and deliberative bodies of self-government that created order while being careful not to trample upon the natural liberties of the citizenry. These people were...

This Fourth of July, Americans mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The experiment it launched rests on a fundamental proposition that’s still radical today. Liberty – the freedom of individuals to choose their own destiny – is a prerequisite for a durable political and economic system. America’s capital markets reflect the same principle. Individual investors are free to choose how to put their savings to work, and they have a wider variety of investment options to choose from than anywhere else around the globe. It is no accident that the...

The debate over government's role in the economy tends to get stuck on one question: Is the distribution of wealth fair? That's worth asking. But it skips something more fundamental. Before society can decide how wealth should be divided, it has to understand where wealth comes from in the first place. History offers a fairly consistent answer. Societies that allow individuals to make their own economic decisions — to buy, sell, invest, and compete — generate more wealth than those where governments attempt to direct production. The reason isn't that entrepreneurs are smarter than...

Four days after the Supreme Court told him tariffs are a branch of the taxing power belonging to Congress, President Trump stood before a joint session and said tariffs would "substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax."  That statement was not a policy preference. It was a constitutional collision, stated plainly, in front of the legislators the Constitution charges with making exactly that decision. Three facts belong in the same sentence: the Supreme Court ruled on February 20 that tariffs are a branch of the taxing power. The Sixteenth Amendment placed that power...

“Please God, give me one more oil boom. This time I promise not to piss it away.” It was a popular bumper sticker in Texas in the 1980s.  It's worth remembering as experts who’ve never built houses, and who’ve surely never borrowed the money necessary to build houses, tell us the solution to the alleged “housing crisis” is simple: Just build more houses. But for one problem, according to the pundits: governmental barriers to building. Take AIER’s Julia Cartwright in the Washington Post. In an otherwise excellent piece revealing the foolishness of...

The Washington Post didn't report it, but Washington, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser recently attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new restaurant (Wheelhouse) in the high-end, Chevy Chase area of DC. Except that Bowser is a Democrat, and Democrats are said to loathe business. No doubt there’s rhetorical truth to the above, but as always with the left, watch what they do as opposed to what they say. While voters and those they vote for in cities like Los Angles, New York, Seattle and San Francisco lean left, think more about what they do. For starters, it would be difficult to find more...

Kevin Warsh has now taken the oath as chairman of the Federal Reserve. The debate over who should lead the central bank is over. The harder debate is what he should say now that he has the platform. He should use it to wake Congress up. The United States now carries roughly $39 trillion in total public debt, with more than $31 trillion held by the public. Debt held by the public is now close to the full size of the American economy. That does not mean debt alone sets interest rates. It does not. But it does mean Congress is asking capital markets to absorb a federal claim on resources that is...

A coalition of attorneys general from 17 states filed a federal lawsuit on June 22 seeking to overturn California’s new Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) program. At present, most people in the U.S. have never heard of EPR, but many Americans are going to become familiar with it in the coming years as EPR laws, now on the books in seven states, begin to take effect.   EPR, like cap-and-trade programs and carbon taxes, raises consumer costs by design. While cap-and-trade programs force companies to pay fees based on their level of carbon emissions, EPR laws create a new...