Your daily briefing for all the top news in Energy, Technology, Finance, and Politics.
Energy
Tom Steyer struggles to find big-money donors
POLITICO
Andrew Restuccia and Kenneth P. Vogel
Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer is falling far short on his pledge to raise $50 million in outside money to make climate change a midterm-election weapon against the GOP. His super PAC, NextGen Climate Action, has raised just $1.2 million from other donors toward that goal, according to still-unreleased figures that his aides shared with POLITICO.
EPA pulls back from plan to garnish paychecks
WASHINGTON TIMES
S.A. Miller
The Environmental Protection Agency bowed to fierce criticism Wednesday and announced that it had hit the breaks on a fast-tracked plan to collect fines by garnishing paychecks of accused polluters. The agency, which has come under withering attacks from Republican lawmakers for attempting a “power grab,” said it still intended to pursue the new authority to garnish wages without a court order. But now it will follow a more typical and longer review process.
Australia Becomes First Developed Nation to Repeal Carbon Tax
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Rob Taylor and Rhiannon Hoyle
After almost a decade of heated political debate, Australia has become the world’s first developed nation to repeal carbon laws that put a price on greenhouse gas emissions. In a vote that could highlight the difficulty in implementing additional measures to reduce carbon emissions ahead of global climate talks next year in Paris, Australia’s Senate on Wednesday voted 39-32 to repeal a politically divisive carbon emissions price that contributed to the fall from power of three Australian leaders since it was first suggested in 2007.
White House Announces Climate Change Initiatives
NEW YORK TIMES
Coral Davenport
President Obama announced a series of climate change initiatives on Wednesday aimed at guarding the electricity supply; improving local planning for flooding, coastal erosion and storm surges; and better predicting landslide risks as sea levels rise and storms and droughts intensify.
Effort to Avoid Vote on Fracking Falters in Colorado
NEW YORK TIMES
Jack Healy
Efforts by leading Colorado Democrats to head off a costly and divisive election-year fight over oil and gas drilling appeared to crumble on Wednesday as Gov. John W. Hickenlooper announced that he did not have enough support to pass a compromise law giving local towns more control over fracking in their backyards. … The announcement left energy developers and environmental groups girding for battle over two measures proposed for the November ballot that would outlaw drilling within 2,000 feet of homes and schools and give communities more power to restrict drilling with environmental laws.
China Flexes Might With Energy Giants
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Brian Spegele and Chester Dawson
Executives at Talisman Energy Inc. are excited about promising oil-and-gas prospects off the coast of Vietnam and the Canadian company is gearing up to drill two exploratory wells there this year. … There is a problem: Proceeding with drilling could bring Talisman into conflict with China, which claims some of the blocks as its own. Talisman declined to comment on China’s position. Mr. Ferneyhough accepts Vietnam’s assurances that Talisman has the right to explore there.
Technology
Rand Paul eyes tech-oriented donors, geeks in Bay Area
POLITICO
Darren Samuelsohn
Rand Paul goes hunting in San Francisco starting Thursday for two things Democrats usually expect to have locked up in the Golden State: rich technology donors and computer geeks game to leave their jobs to work on a White House campaign. Focusing on a libertarian sliver of the Bay Area’s tech crowd, the Kentucky Republican hopes the three-day trip can tap into a powerful resource that could boost his fundraising skills, message delivery and voter turnout — potent technology tools that were a crucial component in President Barack Obama’s two general-election victories.
5 Main Themes Emerge in Net Neutrality Debate
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Gautham Nagesh
But net neutrality, a public policy issue that’s been debated in Washington for more than a decade, inspires a lot of passion, and it’s an issue with more than two sides. Judging from a random sampling of the comments, however, they appear to fall within one of five themes, as follows…
Democratic Leaders Plan to Bypass Wyden on Internet Sales Tax Combo Bill
ROLL CALL
Niels Lesniewski and Humberto Sanchez
Senate Democratic leaders plan to do an end run around Senate Finance Chairman Ron Wyden and combine House-passed legislation extending a moratorium on taxing Internet access with a Senate-passed proposal to require online retailers to collect sales tax.
In Modern Media Realm, Big Mergers Are a Bulwark Against Rivals
NEW YORK TIMES
David Carr
The giant market capitalizations and market power residing in Silicon Valley have rippled into the rest of the economy. The people behind this sudden surge of proposed media mergers say they are only going on steroids to avoid getting sand kicked in their face by even bigger bullies in the technology world. Comcast will contend that it is not just competing with Cablevision and Charter Communications, but also with Google, Amazon and Apple. And people who make programming will assert that they are trying to grow just so they do not get pushed around by Comcast.
Finance
Jack Lew’s Flee America Plan
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Editorial
Mr. Lew’s letter shows that the White House now wants to exploit the inversion flurry as an election year opportunity to demagogue business. Look for Majority Leader Harry Reid to rush a bill to the Senate floor on Mr. Lew’s punitive proposals and then try to use the votes in Senate races this fall. Republicans ought to turn the tables and assail Democrats for supporting the world’s most punitive corporate tax rates and driving capital and jobs overseas. A real agenda for “economic patriotism” would support a tax policy to make America competitive again as a destination for global investment and job creation. But that’s going to take a less cynical President and Treasury Secretary.
Congress at Odds Over How to Curb Inversion Deals
WALL STREET JOURNAL
The quick fix that some Democrats favor would close the exit doors for almost all firms seeking to leave by imposing a higher threshold of foreign ownership. But other lawmakers argue that a temporary patch could actually hurt U.S. companies by making them more vulnerable to a takeover. It also could lead corporations to move valuable headquarters jobs overseas. Meanwhile, the longer-term solution favored by many lawmakers—a politically difficult rewrite of the much-maligned U.S. corporate tax rules—already is dead for this year, and likely faces long odds next year.
Yellen Balks at Proposal to Tie Rates to Formula
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Pedro Nicolaci da Costa and Ben Leubsdorf
“It would be a grave mistake for the Fed to commit to conduct monetary policy according to a mathematical rule,” Ms. Yellen told the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday, amplifying her message in testimony to the Senate Banking Committee a day earlier.
Should Janet Yellen Be Giving Us Stock Picks?
NEW YORK TIMES
Neil Irwin
But it does amount to a government official substituting her own judgment for that of the marketplace, the prices arrived at by thousands of buyers and sellers for an app-maker or a leveraged loan. For a sense of the risks there, consider this: Mr. Greenspan’s warning about irrational exuberance in the stock market took place in December 1996. The worst excesses of the dot-com bubble came years later; even in the worst of the post-dot-com stock crash and the financial crisis of 2008, prices never again fell that low. A person who ignored Mr. Greenspan’s advice and bought into the S&P 500 the morning after his speech has earned a 268 percent return since then (including reinvested dividends).
GOP Lawmakers Seek to Amend Bankruptcy Rules for Big Bank Collapses
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Katy Stech
Several Republican lawmakers want to amend bankruptcy laws to deal with the next big bank failure while avoiding the financial-market seizures that occurred when Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 in 2008. At a congressional hearing on Tuesday, Rep. Spencer Bachus (R., Ala.) said that the Financial Institution Bankruptcy Act is meant to address “bailout fatigue on the part of the American taxpayer.”
SEC commissioner attacks mild financial reforms as a “firing squad on capitalism”
VOX
Dylan Matthews
But I’ve got to say, SEC commissioner Michael Piwowar’s criticisms of FSOC at an American Enterprise Institute event yesterday aren’t ones I’ve heard before: “In preparing for this speech, I thought a lot about what moniker I could use to best describe the FSOC. The Firing Squad On Capitalism. The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy to Hinder Capital Formation. The Bully Pulpit of Failed Prudential Regulators. The Dodd-Frank Politburo. The Modern-Day Star Chamber. You get the point. There are countless terms I could use that are appropriately pejorative and at the same time entirely accurate. For the sake of clarity, I will stick with references to the two official nicknames of the FSOC – the ‘Council’ or the ‘Unaccountable Capital Markets Death Panel.’”
Small Businesses Are Finding Bank Loans Easier to Come By
NEW YORK TIMES
Robb Mandelbaum
By many accounts, as the economy adds jobs, more small businesses are looking to borrow money, and more banks are eager to lend it — at least to the right borrowers. “It’s actually a really great time to access small-business capital,” said Keri Gohman, executive vice president and head of small-business banking for Capital One. “Rates are low and banks are also feeling the economic recovery. We really want to lend. Small-business owners can shop around and work with banks to find the best rates.”
Politics
Raising Stakes on Russia, U.S. Adds Sanctions
NEW YORK TIMES
Peter Baker and James Kanter
President Obama imposed a new round of sanctions against Russia on Wednesday, targeting some of the crown jewels of the country’s financial, energy and defense industries in what officials described as the most punishing measures taken to date by the United States in retaliation for Moscow’s intervention in Ukraine.
Towns Fight to Avoid Taking In Migrant Minors
NEW YORK TIMES
Manny Fernandez
Overwhelmed by an influx of unaccompanied minors who are fleeing violence in their home countries in Central America, federal officials are searching the country for places to house them and have been forced to scrap some proposed shelter sites in California, Connecticut, Iowa, New York and other states because of widespread opposition from residents and local officials.
Protectionists Steel Washington
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Editorial
Remember when trade policy looked like a potential bright spot on the Obama Administration’s economic record? Now with trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic trade talks missing deadline after deadline, Washington is slapping new tariffs on steel imports. This election-year gift to U.S. steel giants and their unions will raise prices for other U.S. firms, handicap domestic energy production and alienate trading partners world-wide.
No, Washington hasn’t solved the country’s debt problem
WASHINGTON POST
Editorial
But the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on Tuesday rained on this bipartisan parade. In its latest long-term budget projection, the country’s arbiter of all things fiscal warned that federal spending remains dangerously unsustainable in the long term. Over the next 25 years, mandatory spending on entitlement programs such as Medicare is set to rise to 14 percent of gross domestic product, double the average over the past several decades. Debt service will become increasingly costly, gobbling up 4.5 percent of GDP in 2039. These obligations will drastically reduce the resources left for everything else in the budget.
