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

Energy

Coal Company Pain Accelerates as Bankruptcy Cases Rise
BLOOMBERG
Dawn McCarty, Sonja Elmquist and Phil Milford
The coal business, after fueling the Industrial Revolution and powering U.S. growth for much of the past century, is now beset by a glut of cheap natural gas and tighter regulation.

 

China’s Plan to Limit Coal Use Could Spur Consumption for Years
NEW YORK TIMES
Chris Buckley
Under pressure to reduce smog and greenhouse gas emissions, the Chinese government is considering a mandatory cap on coal use, the main source of carbon pollution from fossil fuels. But it would be an adjustable ceiling that would allow coal consumption to grow for years, and policy makers are at odds on how long the nation’s emissions will rise.

 

Report: U.S. nuclear industry needs new risk tools
POLITICOPRO (Subscribe)
Darius Dixon
That report, written by a 21-member panel of engineers and scientists appointed by the National Academy of Sciences to derive lessons from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, called on the regulator and plant operators to “actively seek out and act on new information about hazards that have the potential to affect nuclear plant safety.”

 

 

Technology

Cable Companies: Google Threatens Net Neutrality, Not Us
NATIONAL JOURNAL
Brendan Sasso
The real threat to online freedom is from Internet giants like Google and Netflix, according to major cable companies. Those sites could block access to popular content and extort tolls out of Internet service providers, the cable companies warn. The argument is the backward version of the usual fight over net neutrality.

 

Municipal broadband war heats up
POLITICOPRO (Subscribe)
Tony Romm and Alex Byers
Two local government-backed broadband networks asked the FCC on Thursday to challenge state laws that restrict their expansion, a move likely to ramp up tensions between the FCC and congressional Republicans over the future of Internet service in the states. The requests — filed by networks in Chattanooga, Tenn., and Wilson, N.C. — may give FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler the trigger he needs to wade directly into disputes over municipal broadband projects.

 

Comcast Steps Up Its Game on Internet Speeds
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Shalini Ramachandran
Comcast Corp., the largest cable operator in the U.S., has quietly begun extending fiber optic cable all the way to customers’ homes in certain parts of its service area, a significant shift that could help the company better compete with all-fiber providers like Verizon Communications Inc. and Google Inc. on Internet speeds.

 

Google Grants Majority of ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ Requests
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Sam Schechner
Google Inc. has removed tens of thousands of links—possibly more than 100,000—from its European search results from some individuals, according to a person familiar with the matter, illustrating the scale of Europe’s nascent “right to be forgotten.” The Mountain View, Calif., company told European privacy regulators during a meeting in Brussels Thursday that it has removed slightly more than 50% of the links that it has so far processed under the new right, the person said.

 

Tech companies’ diversity problems are even worse at the leadership level
WASHINGTON POST
Brian Fung
Still, the data show that there’s a big gap between the executives at the top of the pyramid and those who actually make the machines go. This is true for Twitter, but also at Yahoo, where women account for 37 percent of the workforce but only 23 percent of leadership positions. Whites make up only 50 percent of Yahoo’s U.S. employees, but as much as 78 percent of its U.S.-based leadership.

 

Rep. Issa takes aim at FTC ‘inquisitions’
THE HILL
Julian Hattem
House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) fired shots at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Thursday for going after companies with poor data security.

 

 

Finance

The Federal Reserve’s Risky Reverse Repurchase Scheme
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Sheila Bair
Four years after the passage of Dodd-Frank, we are still discussing whether the law has made the financial system more stable. These discussions are important, yet too little attention is being paid to a Federal Reserve program called the Overnight Reverse Repurchase Facility, also referred to as ON RRP. This program, while well-intentioned, could be a new source of financial instability. It needs a closer look.

 

Obama Seeks to Close Loophole That Firms Use to Shield Profits Abroad
NEW YORK TIMES
Michael D. Shear and David Gelles
President Obama on Thursday called for Congress to strip away tax advantages that have encouraged a rush of mergers and acquisitions that give companies an overseas base while they maintain their presence in the United States.

 

Dodd-Frank is Obama’s most underappreciated achievement
VOX
Matthew Yglesias
Legislation is properly judged according to what it did accomplish rather than what it didn’t. And Dodd-Frank has done a tremendous amount, far more than is appreciated.

 

New-Home Slowdown Pressures Recovery
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Eric Morath and Kris Hudson
Demand for new homes slowed sharply during the first half, a development that threatens to reverberate beyond the housing market and throughout the broader economy.

 

The Muddled Case of Argentine Bonds
NEW YORK TIMES
Floyd Norris
Thomas Poole Griesa has been a federal judge for 42 years. He has been grappling with Argentina’s debt default for a decade. Only now is he learning how complicated life can be for a judge seeking to control actions by a sovereign government and issuing orders that are supposed to be binding on those who would ordinarily never be within the jurisdiction of an American court.

 

Wall Street Takes a Shine to Argentine Bonds
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Matt Wirz
The largest financial firms spent much of the first part of 2014 devising an escape route for Argentina from a legal standoff with some hedge-fund bondholders that threatens to throw the nation into default for the second time in 13 years. A handful of large banks pitched bond sales that would have paved the way for a settlement with so-called holdout creditors led by Elliott Management Corp. The proposals didn’t win the approval of Argentine officials, and it isn’t even clear how seriously they were considered, given the yawning gap between the Argentine and hedge-fund negotiating positions and the limited popularity of global financial firms in Argentina.

 

 

Politics

Paul Ryan’s anti-poverty plan has some good ideas that all sides can support
WASHINGTON POST
Editorial
The thing to do, therefore, is focus on the most promising, most bipartisan part of Mr. Ryan’s plan — the EITC increase. With support not only from Mr. Ryan and Mr. Obama but also, in different iterations, leading members on both sides of the aisle in the Senate, there should be no problem getting this passed. Heretofore the sticking point had been that the two parties could not agree on how to pay for the measure’s relatively modest cost. Mr. Ryan says to cut corporate welfare — including the Democrats’ pet green-energy grants. The Democrats say to close tax breaks for the rich such as the carried-interest deduction. We say both have a point. So do some of both and get on with it.

 

Some Republicans push compassionate, anti-poverty agenda ahead of 2016 contest
WASHINGTON POST
Zachary A. Goldfarb
What a difference a disastrous election, two years and terrible polling make. If 2012 was a contest to be the toughest, the 2016 presidential Republican primary is likely to include a competition to appear the most compassionate.

 

The ObamaCare-IRS Nexus
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Kimberley Strassel
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Halbig that the administration had illegally provided ObamaCare subsidies in 36 insurance exchanges run by the federal government. Yet it wasn’t the “administration” as a whole that issued the lawless subsidy gift. It was the administration acting through its new, favorite enforcer: the IRS. And it was entirely political. Democrats needed those subsidies.

 

Israel must be permitted to crush Hamas
WASHINGTON POST
Michael Oren
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary of State John Kerry and the foreign ministers of Great Britain and France all are rushing to achieve a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. Their motive — to end civilian suffering and restore stability to the area — is noble. The images of the wounded and dead resulting from the conflict are indeed agonizing. However, these senior statesmen can be most helpful now by doing nothing. To preserve the values they cherish and to send an unequivocal message to terrorist organizations and their state sponsors everywhere, Israel must be permitted to crush Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

 

The drug that’s forcing America’s most important – and uncomfortable – health-care debate
WASHINGTON POST
Jason Millman
Months before Gilead Sciences’ breakthrough hepatitis C treatment hit the market, Oregon Medicaid official Tom Burns started worrying about how the state could afford to cover every enrollee infected with the disease. He figured the cost might even reach $36,000 per patient. Then the price for the drug was released last December: $84,000 for a 12-week treatment course. At that price, the state would have to spend $360 million to provide its Medicaid beneficiaries with the drug called Sovaldi, just slightly less than the $377 million the Oregon Medicaid program spent on all prescription drugs for about 600,000 members in 2013. It potentially would be a backbreaker.

 

Beggar-Thy-Neighbor Medicine
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Editorial
The Sovaldi debate would be more productive if liberals would be honest that they would prefer not to have new drugs if the cost of those medicines interferes with the higher priority of national health care. As for opportunistic insurance executives and lobbyists, ObamaCare is looking like condign punishment.