As my colleague Tad DeHaven announced here earlier this week, Cato just launched the Restoring Free Enterprise project to analyze the federal government’s growing and unprecedented ownership of private US companies and to propose ways to reverse this troubling trend. The United States’ new portfolio — now encompassing 35 different companies across a range of industries — raises numerous problems that the RFE project will document, and my latest Dispatch column covers what may be the most basic one: the complete lack of explicit legal authority to do any of these equity deals. 

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Are banks systematically discriminating against conservatives and Christians? That’s what the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s (OCC’s) new report on debanking has led many people to believe. OCC head Jonathan V. Gould said, “Today’s report provides irrefutable evidence that the nation’s largest banks have denied, debanked and discriminated against customers and lawful businesses.” 

Yet, a careful read of the report shows something else. The OCC simultaneously overstated and understated the problem. 

Evidence Without Scale

In preparation for this report, the OCC reviewed nearly 100,000 complaints—an impressive feat. Yet, the OCC failed to establish just how widespread discrimination might be. The report identifies only about 13 cases of suspected religious or political debanking. Making matters worse, these cases were only provided with minimal information, and it does not appear that the banks were given the chance to provide context for each decision (or at least, no context was published). That’s a problem considering one famous case of alleged religious debanking also involved the ministry running a debt-collection agency in Uganda. 

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Earlier this week, the Cato Institute’s Jones Act Waiver Tracker recorded its 300th completed voyage since the waiver was issued on March 17 for the transportation of energy and fertilizer products. Those voyages carried over 80 million barrels without idling a single Jones Act tanker, providing some indication of how much domestic commerce the Jones Act has constrained.

Freed from the law’s prohibition on using foreign-built and foreign-flagged ships, tankers operating under the waiver have, on numerous domestic routes, delivered more energy cargoes in months than Jones Act vessels have in years. The following figures and charts illustrate the scale of this commerce and hint at what lasting access to foreign shipping could make possible.

Earlier this week, on October 13, the Department of Justice (DOJ) sent an unusual letter to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber. The letter alleges that there are “likely numerous noncitizens registered to vote in the federal election in California.” According to the letter, the DOJ sent a list of the “likely noncitizens” to the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan. The DOJ has asked that Los Angeles County and Secretary Weber “review the list within 48 hours to determine whether any citizens are listed.”

This is highly, highly irregular. I do not know of a previous instance in which the federal government pushed for such a large election administration action in October of an election year.

California mailed ballots out last week. The state is now fully in election mode; some Californians have already voted, and election workers have a full plate for all of October.

Eric Beinhocker, executive director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, and Nick Hanauer, a successful entrepreneur, give a preview of their forthcoming book, Market Humanism, in the detailed report, “Markets Built for Humans: Creating an Economy for People, Planet, and Democracy.” Their main argument is that “markets should be built to serve human flourishing, and when they are, they produce broader prosperity, stronger communities, and a healthier democracy.”.

In their view, neoliberalism or the “neoliberal consensus” includes “free market theories from neoliberal political economy, neoclassical economics, and libertarian philosophy” (“Markets Built for Humans,” p. 9). They argue that neoliberalism has failed and needs to be replaced by a new paradigm to improve economic well-being and social harmony. The authors blame the global financial crisis on failed markets rather than government failure; advocate for industrial and other activist policies (such as higher minimum wages) to empower workers; reject free trade in favor of managed trade, and propose a “middle-out” versus “trickle-down” theory of economic growth.

Economists at the New York Fed have published a new paper on how the 2025 tariffs reached consumer prices, and it has drawn deserved attention. In the paper, Mary Amiti, Sebastian Heise, and David Weinstein trace tariffs from the border to the store shelf. That is no small task, as consumer price categories mix imported and domestic goods and don’t line up with tariff schedules.

Some of the findings confirm their earlier work: Foreign exporters absorbed little of the tariffs, and roughly 90 percent landed on US import prices. The bigger contribution is showing that tariffs also raised the prices of goods made in America. Domestic producers paid more for imported inputs, and some raised their markups as competing imports became more expensive. 

All told, the authors estimate that about a quarter of the tariff increase shows up in consumer goods, with roughly a third of that coming from domestically produced goods. As they explain in an accompanying blog post, that domestic effect builds slowly and takes about a year to fully transmit. The evidence is valuable, though the authors are careful about what it can and cannot tell us about aggregate inflation.

Last week, a chart from a WSJ article went viral. The chart showed that Americans under 35 suffered a greater than 20% decrease in real (inflation-adjusted) net worth between 2022 and 2025, while those 75 and older benefited from a nearly 40% increase. 

These data points fed into the popular memes of the K‑shaped economy and Total Boomer Luxury Communism, the latter of which has merit, at least insofar as entitlements are concerned. But does the data in the chart really support these commonly held beliefs about the economy? Does it really demonstrate, for example, that older people are getting richer at the expense of younger people?

A careful look at the data suggests not.

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