The Open Market Blog

• By: Ryan Young
• 05/08/2019

The 2019 edition of Wayne Crews’ Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State is out now.

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 05/06/2019

Not one, but two potential Federal Reserve Board nominees withdrew from consideration last week, and economic growth and unemployment remained in excellent health. Meanwhile, with…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 05/06/2019

On Sunday, President Trump announced via Twitter that if he does not approve of the results of this week’s U.S.-China trade talks, he will enact…

Trade and International

• By: Ryan Young
• 05/01/2019

Congress is supposed to pass an annual spending budget, though it rarely gets around to it. Instead, the government is usually funded through a mashup…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 04/29/2019

While Washington’s “This Town” types geared up for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the rest of the country flocked to movie theaters for a much…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 04/22/2019

The Notre Dame cathedral in Paris caught fire and sustained heavy damage. The rebuilding will likely take years, though people began politicizing it almost instantly.

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 04/19/2019

Nationwide 5G networks are coming. They will expand possibilities for everything from smartphone applications to GPS to streaming video, and will enable new technologies that…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 04/15/2019

In a remarkable human achievement, scientists took the first-ever image of a black hole. The effort took eight telescopes on five continents, five petabytes of…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 04/08/2019

The news cycle was more sizzle than steak last week. President Trump threatened to shut down the southern border and backed off almost immediately, so…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 04/01/2019

Pundits spent the week engaging in mortal combat over the Mueller Report, which none of them have read, and spring officially sprung with baseball’s opening…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 03/25/2019

As tempers flared over how many “chuggas” to say before “choo-choo,” the 2019 Federal Register topped the 10,000-page mark last week and the number of…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 03/18/2019

President Trump has declared passing the new NAFTA/USMCA as his top legislative priority, but congressional ratification will not be automatic. Mexico and Canada are also…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 03/11/2019

Last week was low-drama by recent standards, but still had some important developments. The U.S. trade deficit set a record for the second year in…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 03/05/2019

The playwright George Bernard Shaw once said that if you laid all the world’s economists end to end, they would not reach a conclusion. President…

Labor and Employment

• By: Ryan Young
• 03/04/2019

The Michael Cohen hearing shenanigans gobbled up the headlines, but actual substantive news happened regarding talks with China and North Korea—in particular, a planned tariff…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 02/25/2019

The federal government was on a four-day work week in honor of George Washington’s birthday, but agencies still found time to issue regulations ranging from…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 02/22/2019

President Trump is mulling a tariff on automobiles. Joining a long list of people urging him against it is the Japanese auto industry. That opposition…

Trade and International

• By: Ryan Young
• 02/18/2019

Congress and President Trump passed a spending bill to avoid another shutdown, but President Trump’s national emergency declaration over a non-emergency provides a troubling precedent…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 02/11/2019

The delayed State of the Union speech happened on Tuesday, but contained no surprises on the policy front. The length of the Federal Register doubled…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 02/04/2019

The Midwest froze, but the Federal Register began to heat up. As I predicted earlier, the first three post-shutdown editions were slow. Then Thursday’s edition…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 01/31/2019

This week Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) introduced the Bicameral Congressional Trade Authority Act, which would reduce the president’s authority to unilaterally enact new tariffs by…

Trade and International

• By: Ryan Young
• 01/28/2019

During the partial shutdown, the Federal Register slowed to a crawl. Published every weekday, an average day’s edition consists of about 270 pages and contains…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 01/28/2019

The partial shutdown ended on Friday, though only on a three-week deal. This likely will not show up in the Federal Register’s page and rule…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 01/21/2019

Last week, people got worked up over hamburgers and a television commercial about razors. Meanwhile the partial federal shutdown continued, and a bill to introduce…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 01/18/2019

President Trump’s doubling of tariffs has already cost the economy almost 1.8 percentage points of growth. That means 2018’s 3.4 percent third quarter growth could…

Trade and International

• By: Ryan Young
• 01/14/2019

On Saturday the partial government shutdown became the longest ever. The news cycle was wall-to-wall wall and shutdown coverage, though Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI) introduced…

Regulatory Reform

• By: Ryan Young
• 01/10/2019

A forthcoming bill, the U.S. Reciprocal Trade Act, written by “Death by China” coauthor Peter Navarro and other presidential advisers, seeks to expand the president’s…

Trade and International