RealClearMarkets Articles

“A couple employees left for the rest of the day. They were pretty rattled.” Those were the words of multi-restaurant owner and Georgetown Events Hospitality Group president Bo Blair, in a Washington Post report by Tim Carman, Warren Rojas, and Maria Luisa Paul. Blair was referencing the arrival of ICE agents at various restaurants in town, including at least one of his own, and “demand letters” served by the agents who were asking for documented proof that employees were eligible to work in the United States. It was difficult to read the report without feeling...

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent justifies President Trump’s rapidly changing tariff policies on the grounds that they create strategic uncertainty. Trump’s tariffs have three contradictory goals--raising revenue, protecting manufacturing, and negotiating leverage -- strategic uncertainty can plausibly be used to achieve only one of them. Tariff uncertainty does not help domestic manufacturing. Uncertainty about the future of tariff policy severely undermines domestic manufacturing growth and development. Expansion of manufacturing takes years to complete,...

From the minute the money is spent, government spending slows economic growth. That’s because central planning of resources is central planning of resources. That government spending is an economy-sapping tax requires mention as economists and economic pundits speculate on who will blink first in response to a mindless tariff war, Donald Trump or Xi Jinping. Oh well, who will? The Wall Street Journal’s Joseph Sternberg believes it could be Trump. About who will win, Sternberg would likely agree that no one wins a tariff war simply because there’s no warring in trade....

With National Small Business Week upon us, President Trump and Republicans in Congress are accelerating their work on pro-growth tax reform to deliver for family-owned and Main Street businesses.   The first step to preserving and making permanent the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act of President Trump’s first term is agreeing to a budget approach that allows the tax cuts to move through Congress faster and by a simple majority vote. Faced with a razor-thin majority, Congressional Republicans impressively beat all expectations by vaulting that difficult legislative hurdle in...

On April 17, a federal court handed down its decision in the Department of Justice’s lawsuit targeting Google’s ad tech, which are a suite of advertising products and services that provide thousands of businesses of all sizes with cost-effective and convenient ways to connect with their customers.  While the court found that the DOJ had failed to prove that Google’s advertiser tools constituted a relevant market in which the company enjoys a monopoly, Judge Brinkema did agree with the government that Google had violated the Sherman Act by monopolizing and unlawfully...

Politicians often forget that the more they prescribe how companies deliver a service, the costlier and less accessible it becomes.  The excessive regulation of consumer credit is a prime example of this maxim. For instance, at the federal level, the Dodd-Frank Act and the numerous regulations issued by Consumer Financial Protection Bureau effectively increased the cost of providing credit in their efforts to protect consumers, resulting in millions of low-income households being denied the ability to obtain credit. Why would North Carolina want to replicate that here? Access to credit...

Following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act in 2018, legal sports betting in America has been expanding. Thirty-eight states and Washington, D.C. have legalized the industry and 33 of those have legalized online sports betting in addition to retail settings. But as Americans move their betting to a safe and legal market and states rake millions in tax revenues, some policymakers are itching to slam the brakes with heavy-handed federal regulations. That’s a terrible bet. Contrary to claims, legalized sports betting...

“You better let me take this. They’d never believe it coming from you.” That’s legendary New York Times editor R.W. Apple at the end of a particularly expensive dinner with Times colleague Joseph Lelyveld. Though Lelyveld had extended the dinner invitation to Apple, and had chosen the venue, Apple’s spending resume included “the world’s single-trip expense-account record.” Only he could submit such a receipt.   The quotes and anecdotes come from Calvin Trillin’s 2024 book/memoir of sorts (review here), The Lede. Trillin’s...

When my boy Coleman was four, he asked for — and got — a Davy Crockett jacket and a coonskin cap for Christmas. Back when Disney celebrated bad asses instead of fruitcakes, he had watched a gazillion episodes of Fess Parker as Davy Crockett. Ah, who remembers the words to The Ballad of Davy Crockett?  “…He killed him a b’ar when he was only three…” Coleman was always pretty good at picking his heroes. When he was nine, he wore a Cal Ripken #8 T-shirt every day for a couple of years. Not only was Davy the King of the Wild Frontier, but...

Biotech advancements often face delays due to bureaucracy, hindering the development of necessary therapies. Now is the time for us to overhaul the archaic procedural measures, including the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) outdated policies and procedures.  If we continue to permit bureaucracy to impede the advancement of science, then people will continue to die waiting for therapeutic advances – and that is unacceptable. With over 30 million Americans suffering from rare diseases, 95% of whom lack approved treatments, time is of the essence. FDA...

He may still turn things around, but it’s a shame about President Trump and the economy. All he had to do was nothing, and what they refer to as "the economy" would be soaring now. Of course, Trump wouldn’t be president if he had it within him to do nothing. Which is why every president is victimized by unforced errors. Referencing historian Stephen Ambrose (1936-2002), the “presidential gene” ensures monumental mistakes that are easy to spot from people on the sidelines. But that’s why the spotters are on the sidelines. The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle...

Every year leading up to Tax Day, Americans face a familiar and frustrating ritual: sorting through receipts, deciphering forms, clicking through software prompts, and hoping they haven’t made a costly mistake.  This annual headache of helping Uncle Sam rifle through your pockets is a personal nuisance and a national time sink that prevents you from doing something more useful and productive with your time. For the 2024 tax year, taxpayers spent a staggering 7.1 billion hours complying with the tax code. The economic cost of this hidden tax on time, based on private-sector labor...

Mergers and acquisitions are a popular target of economic populists on the left and right. Populists blame mergers for increasing the power of large, dominant corporations who make their smaller competitors an offer they can’t refuse—which is to sell their company or be driven out of business by the dominant firm. These attacks distort the vital role mergers and acquisitions play in the economy—and how small firms benefit from merging with, or being acquired by, a larger competitor. An example of how a small business can benefit from being acquired by a large business...

As a child in 4-H, I learned the fable of the Wise Man, The Young Boy, and The Little Bird. In the story, a young boy plans to trick a wise man by hiding a small bird in his hands and asking the wise man if the bird was alive or dead. If the wise man said the bird was alive, the boy would squeeze his hands and kill the bird. If the wise man said it was dead, the boy would open his hands and let the bird fly free. Either way the boy would prove he was smarter than the wise man. The lessons of this fable seem especially relevant to our current moment, as President Trump holds the fate of our...

The Department of Justice has successfully prosecuted Google in two recent antitrust suits, aiming to break up the tech giant for its "illegal excess" of market power.  While often presented as legislation to “protect” consumers and competition in the face of predatory practices, the basic premise of antitrust law is that market power is inherently harmful and needs to be curtailed. But this premise is profoundly unjust. Google's market power was earned through revolutionary innovation and staggering value creation. It should be celebrated, not condemned. Even...

On April 23, 2025, I attended the Goldman Sachs shareholder meeting as a representative of the National Center for Public Policy Research (I’m the Executive Director of its Free Enterprise Project). While there, I asked the following question of CEO David Solomon: “Transgenderism is one of the most divisive issues today, including questions about whether a man can become a woman simply by saying so, whether children can be born in the wrong body, and so on. The divisiveness of that issue likely explains why many corporations have severed ties with the Human Rights...

"Macroeconomics” purpports to break “economies” down to cities, states, and countries. Remember this as economists react with horror to President Trump’s surface, or actual economic ignorance. They rightly disdain his worship of tariffs, but do so without ever bothering to contemplate their own magic, one that presumes to measure the “economies” of cities, states, countries, and most obnoxious of all, the world. Most of us not armed with PhDs that allow us to say we’re “trained economists” (“I do want to urge you to not overweight...

In recent days, headlines have screamed of economic doom. Yet our RealClearMarkets/TIPP survey tells a more grounded story: consumer confidence weakened, but there’s no sign of panic in the data. The RealClearMarkets/TIPP Economic Optimism Index, a key gauge of consumer sentiment, declined from 49.1 in April to 47.9 in May, representing a 2.4% decrease. After hitting a 40-month high of 54.0 in December, the index eased to 51.9 in January and 52.0 in February before falling below the 50.0 threshold in March. May's reading of 47.9 marks the third consecutive month in the pessimistic...

Often, it’s not the crime, but the coverup that gets a politician into trouble. But it’s not just elected officials who need to grapple with this basic truth. It also applies to leaders at major institutions like the nationally chartered banks you and I depend on every day. U.S. Bank recently held its annual shareholder meeting. One proposal asked company leaders to explain why U.S. Bank abruptly canceled the Constitution Party of Idaho —where I serve as state chairman—at the beginning of the 2024 election cycle. It all started last March when I received an...