- Is the Fed really panicking over the election results tonight?
- How hackers could determine who controls the Senate
- Once the elections are over, brace for an Obamacare surprise
- Target America: Saudi Arabia lowers prices for U.S. customers only
- A report from Switzerland on the gold referendum… the bogus “energy savings” from daylight saving time… Stock market “disruption” planned tomorrow… And more!
“If the Republicans take control of the Senate,” says Independent Community Bankers of America president Camden Fine, “two words for the Federal Reserve: Watch out.”
Ah yes, it’s that day — a momentous day, a potentially game-changing day, a…
Oh, hell, whom are we kidding?
Among other “news” items we see this morning — really, nothing more than the media engaged in self-pleasuring speculation — the Dow Jones Newswires tries to make it sound as if GOP control of both the House and Senate will mean more scrutiny of the Fed. Maybe even — gasp! — “reform.”
Uh-huh.
Reading stories like this, we’re reminded of a passage from Tragedy and Hope, the massive 1966 tome by Georgetown poli-sci professor Carroll Quigley — whose most famous student was Bill Clinton.
“The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left,” Quigley wrote, “is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers.
“Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy.”
Mitch McConnell as Senate majority leader? Or Harry Reid? It’s really going to make a difference?
Reid and McConnell (or is it McConnell and Reid?)
But there’s no shortage of people who think the midterm elections are “high stakes”… including, maybe, hackers determined to change the outcome.
“Hackers Could Decide Who Controls Congress Thanks to Alaska’s Terrible Internet Ballots,” says an eyebrow-raising headline at The Intercept.
Two years ago, Alaska became the first state to allow all voters to cast a ballot online. They can mark it on their computers using a Web interface, save the ballot as a PDF and return it to the county clerk.
But wait! There’s fine print that warns, “When returning the ballot through the secure online voting solution, your are voluntarily waving [sic] your right to a secret ballot and are assuming the risk that a faulty transmission may occur.”
Cybercrime experts tell The Intercept the system could be duped from anywhere in the world. “Malware that already resides on many personal computers could be activated to alter votes, PDFs could be altered as they travel from the voter’s computer to that of the elections department, servers could be hacked and insiders could change vote tallies — all without anyone ever knowing.”
[Ed. note: Skeptical as we are that elections mean anything, these developments certainly put a new spin on the cybersecurity story we’ve been following for nearly two years: a foreign power determining control of the U.S. Senate and leaving no fingerprints? Crazy. And investable. Even as we write, millions of federal dollars are about to flow to tiny cybersecurity players that can outsmart the hackers. How big are the potential gains? You won’t know if you don’t click…]
Then again, the most powerful defense against hacked elections turns out to be… the paper ballot.
Electronic voting machines are vanishing from polling places across the land, says the D.C.-insider rag The Hill. “Nearly 70% of voters will be casting ballots by hand on Tuesday, according to Pamela Smith, president of election watchdog Verified Voting.”
After the “hanging chad” debacle of 2000, the feds blew $3 billion on electronic voting machines… then left it to the states to maintain and replace them. Whoops, many states say they don’t have the money for that.
So it’s back to the old-fashioned way, and not a moment too soon: Touch screens were a fiasco from the get-go, and they were once again during early voting this year: Votes for Democrats in Texas flipped to Republican, while votes for Republicans in Illinois flipped to Democrat.
[Helpful advice if you insist on voting: This comes from blogger Brad Friedman, who’s done more than anyone else to expose the scandal of “black-box voting” for the last decade.
If you experience a flipped vote on a touch screen machine, “The most important step you can take,” he says, “is to avoid the problem altogether by voting on a hand-marked paper ballot. If you are not allowed to do so on Election Day in your jurisdiction (and you may want to check, because many states and counties allow it but don’t go out of their way to tell voters), then vote on paper with an absentee ballot if you still can. Then deliver it on Election Day to your precinct, rather than mail it in.
“That’s the best way to optimize the chances of your vote actually being counted, and in the way that you had intended.”
There, don’t say we never did anything for you…]
Get set for a nasty post-election Obamacare surprise, says the Independent Institute’s John Goodman.
“Last year,” Goodman writes at Forbes, “open enrollment in the health insurance exchanges started Oct. 1. This year, the start date has been pushed back to Nov. 15.
“That would be acceptable if there were some administrative or economic reason for the delay. But there appears to be none — other than a desire to keep voters from knowing much about this year’s round of choices before they have to vote.”
Want to know what your premiums will cost? Or how much of a subsidy you’ll get? Sorry, sucker, in many states, you have to wait.
Investor’s Business Daily took a best-guess crack at it, analyzing the cost in for a 40-year-old earning 225% of the poverty level choosing the lowest-cost Bronze plan. [Oy… Just writing that sentence is inducing a mild headache.]
The average among 16 cities analyzed is a 14% increase. But in Las Vegas, it’s 22%, and in Seattle, 64%. Good times.
And please, forget about “repealing Obamacare,” depending on the outcome of the ballot-counting tonight.
Let’s flash back to the 2006 midterm elections, in which Democrats won control of both houses. The day after, incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared of President Bush, “Impeachment is off the table.”
Don’t be surprised if Mitch McConnell says something similar about “repealing Obamacare” tomorrow. Certainly not the individual mandate: There’s too much money in it for the insurance companies and their powerful lobby now that Americans are forced to buy their product. (Never forget: The individual mandate was the demon spawn of the “conservative” Heritage Foundation. See professor Quigley, above.)
No, if you want to protect yourself from Obamacare’s ravages, you have to take matters into your own hands. Fortunately, there’s Laissez Faire’s 2015 Guide to Happiness — hot off the presses. There’s a section devoted to Obamacare where you’ll learn…
- How to claim a $130,000 surgical procedure for just $18,500, even if you’re uninsured or on a high-deductible plan. (See Page 341.)
- Three places you can get lifesaving surgery at 50-80% less than what you’d pay in the United States… yet the quality of the surgery is on par, if not far better than, what you’ll find at your local hospital. (See Page 341.)
- A surprisingly affordable way you can take charge of your own health in the prevention and early detection of disease by getting medical tests without a physician’s referral or needing to involve your insurance. (See Page 345.)
The rest of the book is just as useful, helping you keep the IRS’ hands off your money and the NSA’s hands off your most sensitive personal information. Learn how to get a copy shipped free to your door when you follow this link.
To the markets, where the Saudi sheiks are putting a hurt on crude.
Late yesterday, Saudi Arabia announced it would cut its December selling prices to U.S. customers. And with that, the $80 level on West Texas Intermediate that held throughout October gave way. At last check this morning, a barrel fetches $76.80.
Curiously, Saudi Arabia will raise prices slightly for Asian and European customers. Sure looks like fulfillment of our resident oil field geologist Byron King’s words in this space on Oct. 17: “From all appearances, Saudi leaders want to test the downside economics of North American fracking, Canadian oil sands and probably future deep-water plays. In other words, the Saudis want to undermine future competition from newly evolving oil resources.”
As a reminder, the longer the princes engage in this sort of gambit, the more likely oil will head to the $60-50 range.
But U.S. shale players can still make money at those levels. That was the message Byron underscored all last month, and now our income specialist Neil George affirms it.
Neil has several income-producing energy players in the Lifetime Income Report portfolio, so the issue matters to his readers too: “According to research from a well-known financial firm,” says Neil, “a price range of $40-80 is fine for the profitability of some 80% of U.S. shale producers.”
The players he’s recommended for his readers “are in shape to continue their dividend checks, even as oil prices take a dive.”
Stocks are quiet, traders perhaps awaiting confirmation tonight of conventional wisdom that the Senate will go Republican. The S&P 500 is down less than a half percent, to 2,009.
Gold, you ask? Treading water at $1,166.
“I live in Switzerland,” a reader weighs in with an on-the-ground report on the Swiss gold referendum, “and there hasn’t been much talk so far here in the media (perhaps in German- or Italian-speaking media; I’m from the French-speaking region).
“Anyway, not to burst anyone’s bubble, but there is one thing that your analysts may not know: Although we do have the right to propose initiatives, and have referendums, the Swiss generally trust the government to do ‘the right thing’… the federal council commonly called ‘Les Seven Sages’ (the Seven Wise People) for a reason.
“I don’t have much hope for this initiative, seeing that the government and most political parties are against. But there have been surprises, even in Switzerland!
“Love The 5, almost as much as this initiative!”
“If the main concern with daylight saving time was children coming home in the dark,” a reader writes after yesterday’s mailbag, “in the winter months, we should be setting our clocks FORWARD, not back.
“General consensus on modern DST is that it was proposed in the 1890s by an engineer/contractor in the U.K. (some say he was Scottish) who noticed the ‘idle’ time the working class had during the summer because of the earlier sunrise. His other, and perhaps more important, reason for the proposal was so that he’d have more time in the afternoon and evening to play golf.
“The ‘official’ reason usually given for continuing DST is that it saves energy. The ‘savings’ generated from it have been shown to be essentially nonexistent, leaving us with the same situation as before — some people want more time to play golf during the summer, and they are in a position to force the rest of us to comply with their preference.”
The 5: Yup. As we noted during the time change a year ago, Indiana furnished a perfect case study of the “energy” theory. Until 2006, a large part of the Hoosier state was on Eastern Standard Time year-round — in sync with New York during the winter and Chicago during the summer. Since then, it’s been in sync with New York all the time.
Researchers from Yale and California-Santa Barbara found that under DST, yes, energy was saved from lights that stayed off until later. But the savings was more than offset by air conditioning that kept cranking later into the evening. Electricity use rose about 1%.
“I don’t know where this came from,” adds our final correspondent, “but the story is that when DST was described to an Indian, his reply was, ‘Only a white man would believe he could cut a foot off the bottom of his blanket, sew it on the top and have a longer blanket.'”
The 5: Heh. Which reminds you’ll never see a reference in this e-letter on June 21 to “the longest day of the year.” Really, think about it…
Best regards,
Dave Gonigam
The 5 Min. Forecast
P.S. If you missed our heads-up last week, a major U.S. government agency plans to “disrupt” sections of the stock market tomorrow.
If you have any money in the markets right now, you’ll want to check this out.