InsideSources

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

Energy

After Eric Cantor’s Exit, House Turns Sympathetic Ear From Big Business to Oil and Gas
NEW YORK TIMES
Jonathan Weisman
Eric Cantor’s move on Tuesday to a boutique investment firm in New York drove home a new political landscape emerging on Capitol Hill as the Republican leadership reshuffles in the House: Wall Street and Big Business have lost their most sympathetic ear, oil and gas industries are on the rise, and Louisiana once again has a booming voice at the table. Congress returns next week for a mere 12 scheduled legislative days before the November midterm elections, but in that brief reappearance, the House’s new leadership team will be tested. If nothing is done, the federal government will run out of money on Oct. 1, and the federal Export-Import Bank — which underwrites American private-sector exports — will exhaust its charter.

The Climate Change Agenda Needs to Adapt to Reality
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Edward P. Lazear
The Obama administration is instituting a variety of far-reaching policies to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate climate change. Are any of these capable of making a difference? Simple arithmetic suggests not. Given this reality, we would be wise to consider strategies that complement and may be more effective than mitigation—namely, adaptation.

Halliburton to Settle Deepwater Horizon Claims for $1.1 Billion
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Daniel Gilbert
Halliburton Co. will pay $1.1 billion to Gulf Coast residents, local governments and businesses affected by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, moving to limit its liabilities ahead of a court ruling that could have increased its costs.

Technology

Tax Collectors in the Cafeteria
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Editorial
Having harassed the Tea Party for years, the Internal Revenue Service is now targeting Silicon Valley. The tax collectors are offended by the practice, common in the technology industry, of providing meals to employees without counting the food as taxable compensation.

Welcome to the Uber Wars
POLITICO
Andrew Zaleski
Maryland is the first state to rule the Silicon Valley startup a transportation company, not an app. Will Uber fight back?

Netflix Supports Government-Run Internet
NATIONAL JOURNAL
Brendan Sasso
In a filing to the Federal Communications Commission made public Tuesday, Netflix argued that cities should be allowed to build their own networks—especially in areas overlooked by commercial providers. Municipal broadband can spur competition, meaning faster connections for residents, the company argued.

Most comments warned FCC against ‘fast lanes’
THE HILL
Julian Hattem
About two-thirds of people commenting on potential new rules for the Internet warned regulators not to allow “fast lanes” online, according to an analysis of hundreds of thousands of the filings.

Comcast bets on hyper-local by reviving EveryBlock
WASHINGTON POST
Nancy Scola
The cable giant Comcast is reviving the once-future of local online news, announcing on its corporate blog that it has expanded its relaunch of the news and social site EveryBlock to include its home city of Philadelphia, at the same time the company is digging into its potential nation-wide merger with Time Warner Cable. “EveryBlock,” writes Comcast’s director of local media development Paul Wright, “is a personalized news feed that allows users to stay connected with neighbors, interact and share what’s happening on their block, and discover great content and information from around their area.

Faster broadband begets faster broadband, report says
WASHINGTON POST
Nancy Scola
Gig.U, the short-hand name for the Aspen Institute-affiliated University Community Next Generation Innovation Project, is newly out with its third annual report. And in it the group argues that their initial promise — that small university high-speed “test beds,” the one-block area around Case Western in Cleveland that served as its inspiration, will spur greater investment in fiber broadband across the board — is bearing out.

Finance

Sell Fannie and Freddie, don’t kill them
WASHINGTON TIMES
James K. Glassman
American taxpayers stepped up in the financial crisis, and they deserve to double their money. For that to happen, the government needs to act responsibly and sell Fannie and Freddie to private owners — not throw a $200 billion asset away.

Eric Cantor: Beltway big shot to Wall Street titan?
POLITICO
Jake Sherman, Anna Palmer and Ben White
Eric Cantor is trying to pull off an audacious reinvention: morphing from Washington powerbroker to Wall Street rainmaker, all while keeping his political influence alive. The Virginia Republican rose to prominence in Washington cutting deals between warring political factions, raising millions of dollars for Republicans and running the raucous House floor. Now he’ll try to find out what — if anything — that means on Wall Street.

Liquidity Rules Coming to Wall Street
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Ryan Tracy and Victoria McGrane
The new liquidity rules, the first of which will be voted on by the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Wednesday, are aimed at preventing the kind of funding crises that helped topple Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. But they could alter Wall Street in fundamental ways, including depressing earnings and crimping lending. The rules will require firms to load up on ultrasafe assets, which analysts warn may create a drag on banks’ earnings since those assets deliver lower returns. Industry officials and other observers say the rules may also lessen banks’ appetite for lending when the economy strengthens, since the firms are diverting money they might otherwise lend.

Banks’ Fee Bonanza Dries Up
WALL STREET JOURNAL
James Sterngold
Banks are making less of their money from customer-account fees than at any time in the past seven decades as strict government rules and changing consumer behavior squeeze a major source of revenue. After peaking in 2009, the annual account fees collected at U.S. commercial banks have declined markedly, even as the volume of bank deposits has swelled, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The fees have dropped nearly 21% to $32.5 billion last year from $41.1 billion in 2009. The total fees had climbed every year since 1942, when the FDIC started collecting the data.

Europe Crisis Is Resistant to Medicine of Low Rates
NEW YORK TIMES
Jack Ewing
This upside-down financial world, in which lenders pay borrowers to take their money, is the result of a decision by the European Central Bank in June. The E.C.B. effectively imposed a penalty on banks that park money in the central bank’s vaults. The radical move was an attempt to stoke the economy by forcing banks to lend to businesses and consumers. But the strategy has not worked, one reason the central bank is under increasing pressure to try something else when it meets on Thursday — limited though its remaining options might be.

Questions for the Government in an Insider Trading Case
NEW YORK TIMES
Peter J. Henning
What if the government knows a crime is about to take place but does nothing to stop it and instead allows the crime to happen so it can gather additional evidence for a later prosecution? When the crime is insider trading, perhaps the fact that there are no individual victims justifies allowing someone to use confidential information to earn illegal profits. But there is still something troubling when a crime that can be easily stopped is allowed to occur.

Politics

Lawmakers to Obama: Hit ISIS
THE HILL
Justin Sink and Amie Parnes
Lawmakers from both parties on Tuesday exhorted President Obama to broaden the military campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) after the group released a second video that appeared to show the beheading of an American journalist.

Bracing for New Challenges in Year 2 of Health Care Law
NEW YORK TIMES
Reed Abelson
One challenge facing consumers will be wide swings in prices. Some insurers are seeking double-digit price increases, while others are hoping to snare more of the market by lowering premiums for the coming year. At the same time, the Obama administration is expected to try to persuade about five million more people to sign up while also trying to ensure that eight million people who now have coverage renew for another year. Adding to the complexity is the shorter time frame for choosing a new policy: three months instead of six.

Senate control ‘on knife’s edge’
POLITICO
James Hohmann
Some $400 million has already been spent in the battle for the Senate. Yet the record-shattering early money has hardly budged the half-dozen races that will decide the fate of the upper chamber, and two months out from Election Day, top officials from both parties say the election truly could go either way.

GOP Senate hopefuls favor over-the-counter birth control
WASHINGTON POST
Sandhya Somashekhar
At least three GOP hopefuls have spoken during the summer in favor of allowing certain types of contraception to be sold without a prescription. Rep. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), who is challenging incumbent Sen. Mark Udall (D), on Tuesday released a television ad in which he tells a room full of nodding women, “I believe the pill ought to be available over the counter, around the clock, without a prescription. Cheaper and easier for you.” The ad followed similar remarks by Ed Gillespie, a Republican running for Senate in Virginia, and Mike McFadden, who is challenging Sen. Al Franken (D) in Minnesota.

Alaska Race Sees Democrat Quit Campaign for Governor
NEW YORK TIMES
Kirk Johnson
The race for governor of Alaska took a decided turn into the wild on Tuesday when the Democratic candidate, Byron Mallott, said he would withdraw and run instead for lieutenant governor alongside an independent candidate, Bill Walker.

Report Tallies Big Ad Spending by Outside Groups in Senate Races
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Rebecca Ballhaus
Candidates and parties are only slightly outspending outside groups in the 27 Senate races with the highest levels of spending, another sign of the rapid growth of outside cash in recent years, according to a new report by the Center for Public Integrity. The report, which is based on estimates from the ad tracking service Kantar Media/CMAG and only includes spending on TV ads, found that candidates and parties have spent $78.6 million on 223,700 ads this cycle. Outside groups follow closely behind, spending $74.8 million on 204,500 ads.

The shadow of ‘dark money’ haunts the midterms
WASHINGTON POST
Editorial
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, so-called dark-money spending in the midterms will easily exceed the spending records set in the last presidential election. These groups are not supposed to have politics as their primary purpose, but many of them do, or manage to skirt the rules. The Internal Revenue Service is working on new regulations governing these groups and should force them into the sunshine or put them out of business. Welcome to the Dark Money Express. All in all, it won’t be a pretty trip.

The Elections Cop Invites Mischief
NEW YORK TIMES
Editorial
The country’s increasingly lawless political system needs a traffic cop to set clear rules and rein in violators who think nothing of breaking the spending limits. That’s supposed to be the job of the Federal Election Commission, but the agency has made a travesty of its mission, encouraging bad behavior rather than stopping it.

Ukraine deserves support from NATO countries even if it’s not part of the alliance
WASHINGTON POST
Editorial
Russia’s aggression in Ukraine poses a critical test to the Western alliance, and the war there is at a tipping point. The response cannot be to cede Ukraine while trying to dissuade Mr. Putin from further conquests.

Deterring a European War
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Editorial
The temptation of democracies is to believe that autocrats treasure peace and stability as much as we do. Europeans in particular want to believe that their postwar institutions and economic integration have ended their violent history. But autocrats often prosper from disorder, and they need foreign enemies to feed domestic nationalism. This describes Russia under Mr. Putin, who is Europe’s new Bonaparte. His goal is to break NATO, and he’ll succeed unless the alliance’s leaders respond forcefully to his threat.