InsideSources

Your daily briefing for all the top news in Energy, Technology, Finance, and Politics.

Energy

OPEC Split as Oil Prices Fall Sharply
NEW YORK TIMES
Clifford Krauss
Oil prices sank again on Monday, giving consumers more of a break and causing a split among OPEC leaders about what action should be taken, if any, to halt the slide. The price drop has led to a near free fall in gasoline prices in the United States. On Monday, the national average price for regular gasoline was $3.20, 9 cents lower than it was a week ago and 14 cents below the price a year ago, according to the AAA motor club.

Global Glut Keeps Pressure on Oil Prices
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Nicole Friedman
Until recently, many investors expected that members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries would collectively cut production. Such a move would quickly bring supply and demand back in line and likely spur a rebound in prices. But a rift within OPEC is making a reduction in oil exports look less likely at the group’s meeting next month. That sets up the oil market for a slow grind lower, investors and analysts say. And within the U.S., companies also can remain profitable with prices at current levels. Traders and analysts say that means oil prices could drop below $80 a barrel before producers in the U.S. and elsewhere feel enough pressure to ease back on output.

EPA readies major ozone rule change
THE HILL
Timothy Cama and Tim Devaney
The Obama administration is preparing to unveil an air pollution rule shortly after the midterm elections that could be among the most costly and controversial in history. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is seeking approval from the White House for a proposal to update the nation’s outdated ozone standards. The agency punted on the air pollution rules three years ago and missed another deadline last year.

Offshore drilling a winner in tight contests
FUEL FIX
Jennifer A. Dlouhy
Arctic drilling may not be a top tier topic in the Nov. 4 mid-term elections, but new polling suggests that endorsing oil and gas exploration in remote waters north of Alaska could be a winning strategy for some candidates in tight Senate contests.

Pentagon Signals Security Risks of Climate Change
NEW YORK TIMES
Coral Davenport
The Pentagon on Monday released a report asserting decisively that climate change poses an immediate threat to national security, with increased risks from terrorism, infectious disease, global poverty and food shortages. It also predicted rising demand for military disaster responses as extreme weather creates more global humanitarian crises.

Crash Test Dummies
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Editorial
The White House blockade of the Keystone XL and other modern pipelines hasn’t stopped domestic fracking or development of the Alberta oil sands. Instead, the industry transports oil and natural gas to refiners and midstream companies using the technology of the 19th century: Seven of every 10 barrels from North Dakota’s Bakken shale move by rail, and total U.S. carloads of crude oil have increased 4000% since 2008. So now President Obama ’s regulators have turned their gaze to the ostensible dangers of trains.

Exxon Blasts Movement to Divest From Fossil Fuels
NATIONAL JOURNAL
Ben Geman
Exxon Mobil’s blog, titled “Perspectives,” posted a lengthy attack Friday about the divestment movement, which urges universities, churches, pension funds, and other big institutional investors to dump their shares of oil and coal companies as part of the fight against global warming. But the blog post calls the movement “out of step with reality,” saying it’s at odds with the need for poor nations to gain better access to energy, as well as the need for fossil fuels to meet global energy demand for decades to come.

Technology

Will Boom Lead to Bust in Silicon Valley?
NEW YORK TIMES
Editorial
The technology industry is clearly prospering, but has it entered a period of irrational exuberance? There are good reasons to worry that it has and that the bursting of this bubble could be painful, to investors in and employees of tech firms as well as to the broader economy.

Obama Makes FCC’s Tight Spot on Net Rules Even Tighter
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Gautham Nagesh
“The White House has continued to send signals that it wants the FCC to propose meaningful rules against discrimination,” said Public Knowledge president and former Justice Department antitrust official Gene Kimmelman. “I think it will be extremely unlikely the FCC doesn’t take note of the depth of the concern.”

Facebook speeds up Web in Indonesia
THE HILL
Facebook’s project to bring the Internet to rural and developing areas around the globe worked with wireless companies in Indonesia to speed up local mobile applications by up to 70 percent. Over the last year, Facebook’s Internet.org project has been working with two companies — Ericsson and XL Axiata — to analyze and speed up people’s access to the Web via their smartphones, without building major new infrastructure.

Ads Tied to Web Searches Criticized as Deceptive
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Rolfe Winkler
Federal regulators last year told Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., and Microsoft Corp. to more clearly highlight the ads in their search-engine results, to avoid deceiving consumers. In response, the three leading U.S. search engines have done little, making it difficult for users to distinguish ads from “natural” search results.

Aereo to the FCC: Let us join the cable companies we tried to replace
WASHINGTON POST
Brian Fung
The Federal Communications Commission is  weighing whether to extend regulations for satellite television providers, cable companies and other “multichannel video providers” to Aereo and other “linear” online video distributors. (Linear distributors are considered distinct from on-demand services like Netflix or Hulu, so those services aren’t likely to be affected by the rule.) In a meeting last week, Aereo told the FCC that it would be willing to accept those regulations. … What Aereo left unsaid here is really the biggest piece of news: By accepting the label of MVPD, Aereo would also need to start negotiating with broadcasters over content, or “retransmission” fees — which is precisely what Aereo’s original business model was designed to avoid.

Finance

The Economic Nuances of the Latest Nobel Laureate
WALL STREET JOURNAL
David R. Henderson
On Monday, Jean Tirole, a professor at France’s Toulouse University, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences “for his analysis of market power and regulation.” Someone at the news conference in Stockholm asked if this was a “political prize.” Tore Ellingsen, chairman of the prize committee, said it wasn’t: “Like an engineer, he offers a tool kit for problem solving that is applicable no matter what your political preference.” That’s true. Mr. Tirole has done first-rate work, using game theory to analyze markets in which there are only one or a few dominant sellers. Most economists would probably agree that he deserved the prize.

Conservative group projects huge Dodd-Frank price tag
THE HILL
Kevin Cirilli
The remaining compliance costs of Dodd-Frank will total $10.3 billion once they are implemented, according to new research released Monday by the conservative American Action Forum (AAF). The costs are not just monetary. Complying with the regulations will also eat up 5.1 million hours in total, according to the AAF research, first shared with The Hill and authored by Sam Batkins, AAF’s regulatory policy director.

Elizabeth Warren: Obama team picked Wall Street
POLITICO
Jonathan Topaz
“[W]hen the going got tough, [Obama’s] economic team picked Wall Street,” Warren said in an interview with Salon published on Sunday. “They protected Wall Street,” the senator continued. “Not families who were losing their homes. Not people who lost their jobs. Not young people who were struggling to get an education. And it happened over and over and over.”

Calculating the Grim Economic Costs of Ebola Outbreak
NEW YORK TIMES
Andrew Ross Sorkin
The most authoritative model, at the moment, suggests a potential economic drain of as much as $32.6 billion by the end of 2015 if “the epidemic spreads into neighboring countries” beyond Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, according to a recent study by the World Bank.

‘Operation Choke Point’ Hits the Mark
NEW YORK TIMES
Editorial
Payday lenders and their friends in Congress are trying to intimidate the Justice Department and federal regulators into abandoning an important strategy designed to protect depositors from unauthorized withdrawals from their bank accounts.

The federal government gets sued for saving AIG
WASHINGTON POST
Editorial
To be sure, Mr. Greenberg was no longer in charge of AIG when it engaged in its riskiest financial engineering. Otherwise, though, his claim of victimization has nothing going for it. The U.S. government had ample legal authority to bail out AIG in the public interest and no time to debate the illiquid/insolvent distinction or to haggle over price. Mr. Greenberg’s beef ignores one very large point: His shares would have been worth zero if the firm went under. His indignant demand for billions of dollars in compensation now illustrates why so many Americans have lost faith in the financial sector.

Loan mortgage bankers some common sense
USA TODAY
Editorial
Lenders live in fear of not being to unload their mortgages or, worse yet, being forced to buy them back if Fannie or Freddie later finds some uncrossed “t” or undotted “i” it doesn’t like. The mortgage industry would be healthier and saner if Fannie and Freddie were eliminated or turned into traditional companies with no federal charter. But don’t tell this to lenders. The very people who decry tight lending standards and heavy regulations are the first to oppose reforms. They love flipping their mortgages to Fannie and Freddie. And they love the subsidization of having taxpayers backstop the mortgage industry. Their solution: Lighten up on the regulation while leaving the taxpayers at risk. This is no more sensible than denying a loan to Ben Bernanke.

Why lenders are running scared
USA TODAY
David H. Stevens
The solution is a clear, reasonable set of rules so lenders can be confident that they won’t face unending scrutiny and enormous legal costs should a borrower default for reasons unrelated to the mortgage itself. Lenders need to be accountable for mistakes. And they have been, to the tune of more than $100 billion in fines and settlements in the past eight years. But the current atmosphere has lenders running scared.

Politics

The Sorting Election
NEW YORK TIMES
David Brooks
People in San Francisco and Houston are achieving success while pursuing different economic models. It probably doesn’t make much sense to govern them intrusively from Washington as if they were engaged in the same project.

An Obamacare October surprise?
POLITICO
David Nather
Obamacare premiums aren’t rising everywhere. They just have a way of finding the states with the biggest Senate races. And that could be very bad timing for Democrats in two of the party’s key contests.

2014 Made Simple: Democrats Lose Edge on Economic, Foreign Policy
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Gerald Seib
Democrats’ problem is simple. They have lost the advantage they had at the outset of the Obama presidency as the party best able to handle the federal government’s two most basic tasks: running foreign policy and tending to the economy.

Senate Contest in South Dakota Is Free-for-All
NEW YORK TIMES
Jonathan Martin
In an era of homogenized, data-driven campaigns, a quirky and unpredictable contest has emerged in South Dakota, confounding operatives and experts and potentially deciding who controls the United States Senate after the midterm elections.

An Ad With a Wheelchair Shakes Up the Texas Governor’s Race
NEW YORK TIMES
David Montgomery
A 30-second TV spot airs only in selected markets in Texas, but just four days after its release, the “wheelchair ad” from the campaign of State Senator Wendy Davis, the Democratic candidate for governor, has provoked a nationwide debate over its tone and the boundaries of political attack ads. But as all negative advertising does, the spot puts a second fundamental issue in play: Will it help Ms. Davis’s campaign or hurt it?

Can’t quit Mitt: Friends say Romney feels nudge to consider a 2016 presidential run
WASHINGTON POST
Philip Rucker and Robert Costa
Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee and now the tacit head of the Republican Party, visited Iowa as part of a feverish nationwide tour designed to help the GOP take control of the Senate. He has insisted that he is not interested in running for president a third time. But his friends said a flurry of behind-the-scenes activity is nudging him to more seriously consider it.

Obama, Congress and Iran
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Editorial
Lost in the chaos of the Middle East is that the United States and Iran are fast approaching next month’s deadline to strike a deal on Tehran’s nuclear program. This has been teed up for years as the crown jewel of President Obama ’s foreign-policy legacy. On current course, it’s more likely to end up as another setback to U.S. security. President Obama’s insistence on consulting largely with himself on the world’s most complex issues is well known. Most troublesome for the outcome with Iran is his rejection of needed support from Congress.

At the Vatican, a Shift in Tone Toward Gays and Divorce
NEW YORK TIMES
Elisabetta Povoledo and Laurie Goodstein
In a marked shift in tone likely to be discussed in parishes around the world, an assembly of Roman Catholic bishops convened by Pope Francis at the Vatican released a preliminary document on Monday calling for the church to welcome and accept gay people, unmarried couples and those who have divorced, as well as the children of these less traditional families.