The breach between Washington and Kyiv became public on Thursday, and Europe answered it in Brussels on Friday morning. In an interview with Newsmax aired Thursday, the President called Ukraine’s renewed strikes on Russian oil refineries “a disgrace,” said that “all he’s doing is making the world oil price higher,” and said of Volodymyr Zelenskyy: “I think I find Zelenskyy to be more difficult to deal with than Putin.” Zelenskyy had paused the strikes for three days at the President’s request, then resumed them on Thursday on the ground that Moscow had never stopped hitting Ukraine’s grid. He arrived at a European Union summit in Brussels flanked by Ursula von der Leyen and António Costa, where von der Leyen said the EU had supported the energy ceasefire “but we have seen that Russia did not respect it, not a single minute,” promised a twenty-second round of sanctions, and added: “We will not lift any sanctions unless Russia stops the war.” Russian drones killed several people in Kharkiv overnight and left some 270,000 households without power in the western Volyn region, according to the local governors.

The immediate stake is diesel. The President’s objection to the refinery campaign is that it raises the price of the fuel, and his administration has agreed to import Russian diesel into the American market, an arrangement the BBC describes as controversial in both capitals. West Texas Intermediate settled Thursday near ninety-eight dollars a barrel and traded at $97.72 as of 6:50 a.m. Eastern this morning, down a quarter of a dollar. Gold was $4,198.60 an ounce, and the ten-year note yielded 5.104 percent as of 7:00 a.m.

The administration and the rule of law

The Register published 207 documents across Wednesday’s and Thursday’s issues: no presidential documents at all, 25 rules, 14 proposed rules, and 168 notices. The absence of presidential documents over a two-day window is worth stating plainly rather than padding.

Two energy rules matter. The Environmental Protection Agency co-proposed two approaches to revising the 2026 and 2027 small refinery exemption reallocation volumes under the Renewable Fuel Standard, in response to “a higher volume of 2025 SREs than previously projected” when the agency set the standards on April 1. One approach would “reallocate the additional 2025 exempted RVO equally between the 2026 and 2027 compliance years”; the other would place all of it in 2027. Because the 2026 standards would change, the proposal may also extend the existing 2026 compliance reporting deadline of March 31, 2027. A public hearing is set, with pre-registration for accommodations due October 28.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission published the third of four consecutive weekly notices of a phased construction permit application from SMR, LLC, on behalf of Palisades SMR, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Holtec International, for a dual-unit SMR-300 plant at the Palisades Energy Center in Covert, Michigan. The units are individually named Pioneer Unit 1 and Pioneer Unit 2. The application includes a request for a limited work authorization, which is the permission to begin site preparation before a license issues, and the notice carries the docket number NRC-2026-0265. A weekly notice is a procedural step, not an approval, but the filings have moved past the paper stage.

One notice is worth naming for how it was framed. The Office of Administration at the Executive Office of the President proposed improvements to the granite façade of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building, to “restore and beautify its physical appearance” and “bring it into visual alignment with the neighboring White House.” The notice states that the Office of Administration “is not a Federal agency and is therefore is not required to comply with either NEPA or the NHPA,” and that the building is exempt under Section 107 in any case. It is following the procedures voluntarily, and it is taking comments through November 16 under docket OA-2026-0001. An office that owes the public nothing is asking anyway.

The Interior Department capped traffic on the restricted section of the Denali Park Road at 160 vehicles per 24-hour period, replacing a seasonal limit written as 10,512 permits and conforming the regulation to a management plan the Park Service has followed since 2012. The Mine Safety and Health Administration scheduled a virtual public hearing on its proposal to require powered air purifying respirators in underground mines. And the Securities and Exchange Commission granted accelerated approval to a Cboe rule change permitting the listing of binary options on key performance indicators reported by certain issuers of stock, a contract that pays on a company’s own published numbers.

The courts

The Supreme Court filed nothing in the window and the D.C. Circuit filed nothing, a quiet two days worth stating as quiet.

The district court in Washington took twenty new entries, all docketed October 15, and one cluster stands out. Two miscellaneous matters concern sealed search warrant records. The first is captioned In re In the Matter of the Search Warrant of Ilhan Omar’s Washington, D.C. Residence, No. 1:26-mc-00147, naming the residence of Representative Ilhan Omar. The second, No. 1:26-mc-00144, is the application of fourteen press organizations for access to sealed search warrant records. That docket carries a scheduling order of October 15: the government is to file any response to the application by October 22, so ordered by Chief Judge James E. Boasberg. Two further applications seek the same records, one from the New York Times Company, No. 1:26-mc-00145, and one from the Washington Sun, No. 1:26-mc-00148. This report states what the dockets state: the caption, the numbers, the filings, and the deadline. It does not state what the warrant was for or what has been seized, because no source read for this edition says.

Among the civil complaints, two name the same defendant within a day of two others: Pinto Gomez v. Mullin, No. 1:26-cv-03614, and Mullin v. Associated Newspapers Limited, No. 1:26-cv-03615. Three are records actions against agencies: Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of Justice, Howey v. Federal Bureau of Investigation, and League of Women Voters v. Department of Homeland Security. Key Investment Group, LLC v. Federal Trade Commission and Center for Biological Diversity v. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service complete the window. As before, the pack carries names and numbers and nothing about the claims.

Of the watched dockets, none moved. Beatty v. Trump, No. 1:25-cv-04480, Phang v. Blanche, No. 1:26-cv-01417, and its appeal at D.C. Cir. No. 26-5299 each recorded no filing in the window.

Markets

Thursday’s session reversed Wednesday’s, and the reversal was not uniform. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 52,177.69, up 556.21 points or 1.08 percent. The S&P 500 finished at 7,744.06, up 25.12 points or 0.33 percent, and the Nasdaq Composite at 26,713.026, up 20.158 points or 0.08 percent. The day before, the Nasdaq had fallen 1.88 percent while the Dow lost 0.09 percent. Money moved out of the long-duration names and into the industrial average, which is a rotation rather than a rally, and the index most exposed to a five percent ten-year note barely moved.

The CBOE volatility index was 16.12 as of 6:59 a.m. Eastern, down 2.07 percent, and the dollar index 101.66 as of 7:00 a.m., down 0.39 percent. Gold rose to $4,198.60 an ounce, up $28.50 or 0.68 percent, and West Texas Intermediate traded at $97.72 a barrel, down 0.26 percent.

The Treasury’s daily curve added its October 15 row: 4.77 percent at two years, 5.10 at ten, and 5.43 at thirty, against 4.82, 5.19, and 5.52 the day before. The whole curve rallied, with the longest maturities falling nine basis points and the two-year falling five, which narrowed the two-to-ten spread from 37 basis points to 33. In the cash market this morning the ten-year yielded 5.104 percent, which the quote service carries as a rise of 1.7 basis points. A curve that rallies in parallel while the Dow leads the equity market and gold firms is not pricing a growth scare; it is pricing a slower path of rate cuts.

The federal debt stood at $40,329,229,827,541 on October 14, down $14.65 billion from the prior business day, against an increase of $42.40 billion the day before. Debt held by the public was $32.48 trillion of the total, and $7.85 trillion was intragovernmental.

The economy

No new reading arrived in this window. The pack carries the same three September figures this report used yesterday: the consumer price index for all urban consumers at 336.940, against 334.980 in August and 333.918 in July; unemployment at 4.2 percent, a tenth of a point above August and July; and total nonfarm payrolls at 159,044 thousand, against 159,015 thousand in August. September’s increase of 1.960 index points is 0.6 percent for the month, roughly double August’s 0.3 percent. Payroll growth of 29,000 is below what the labor force needs to hold the unemployment rate steady, which is why that rate rose. Prices accelerating while hiring stalls is the arithmetic the ten-year note is trading.

Elections and the midterms

The midterm board held its shape. On Polymarket, the House market put the Democratic Party at 90.5 percent on $304,042 of 24-hour volume and the Republican Party at 9.5 percent on $69,703. The Senate market put the Democratic Party at 64.5 percent on $123,228 and the Republican Party at 37.5 percent on $51,215. In Texas, James Talarico held 62.5 percent on $66,616 against Ken Paxton at 37.5 percent on $82,954, the larger book of the two. In Alaska, Senator Dan Sullivan stood at 25.5 percent on $71,360.

The balance-of-power market is the one to read carefully, because its largest book carries the smallest probability. The outcome labeled “Other” holds 0.1 percent on $375,965, the heaviest volume in the pack’s midterm set, and a result priced at a tenth of a percent with that much money behind it is a venue oddity rather than a forecast. Setting it aside, a Democratic sweep is 62.5 percent on $49,350 and a Republican sweep 8.5 percent on $75,485. These are the venues’ prices and not this site’s view.

Away from the venues, the campaign season produced a security scare. The FBI and the Postal Inspection Service said they were tracing “suspicious mailings”, some intercepted before delivery, sent to congressional and state election offices. At least five Democratic senators’ offices received them, including those of Alex Padilla, Chris Murphy, and Kirsten Gillibrand, and the Delaware Department of Elections opened a letter containing a white powder on Thursday. The Oklahoma State Election Board and the Louisiana and Ohio secretaries of state reported similar letters; the Louisiana office was evacuated and later reopened after no harmful substance was found. Padilla called the incident “a stark reminder of the very real danger facing those who serve the public and who help administer our elections.” Election day is November 3.

The world

The week’s turn is that the United States and Ukraine are now arguing in public, and that the argument is about oil. Ukraine stopped hitting Russian refineries for three days at the President’s request, then resumed on Thursday; the BBC reports Zelenskyy’s account that Moscow never honored the pause. The President’s reply, on Newsmax, was to side with the complaint rather than the tactic: the strikes are “a disgrace,” and “there are a lot of targets you can hit, but when you shoot at diesel refineries where you make, you know, diesel oil, and we need that, and the world needs that, then he’s not doing a good service for the world.”

Europe spent Friday answering the question the exchange raised. Von der Leyen told reporters the EU had backed the ceasefire and that Russia “did not respect it, not a single minute,” and she promised a twenty-second sanctions package. Costa, beside her, said “this is no time to withdraw support” for Ukraine and “no time to relieve Russian sanctions,” a remark aimed at Washington without naming it. Macron called it “crucial” that Ukraine receive “all the means necessary to protect itself,” and Donald Tusk posted that Ukrainian friends are not alone. Russia’s answer to European sanctions has been to take European property: Euronews reports that five more firms were placed under interim management, among them the French flooring maker Tarkett, the Belgian hygiene producer Ontex, and a unit of the Irish packaging group Smurfit Kappa, with combined annual revenue above 50 billion roubles.

The venues, meanwhile, price the wider region as though the fighting were settling. On Polymarket, a ceasefire between the United States and Iran continuing through October 31 stands at 81.5 percent on $290,554, and an Israel-Iran ceasefire through October 21 at 93.5 percent on $196,444. Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz returning to normal by October 31 is priced at 0.5 percent on $197,954, and an American invasion of Iran before 2027 at 15.5 percent on $263,755. The President said on Newsmax, in the same interview, that he would not use a nuclear weapon: “I wouldn’t use nuclear. We don’t have to. We’re the greatest nuclear power in the world.” Elsewhere, Brazil’s presidential election prices Flávio Bolsonaro at 78.4 percent on $563,170 against Lula at 21.5 percent on $1,444,347.

Sources

Fetched for this edition

Court dockets

Market and election prices

Data

  • Bureau of Labor Statistics, public data API, series CUUR0000SA0, LNS14000000, and CES0000000001.
  • The U.S. Treasury daily yield curve, the Treasury’s debt-to-the-penny figures, and the CNBC quote service carry no link in this edition: their endpoints were read by the collector, which did not record a URL for them, and this report does not construct one.

PRH | huffmanwrites.org | © Philip Huffman