Israel’s election returned no clear winner. Partial results from the Central Elections Committee give Likud the largest single party at 27 seats, with the bloc around Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at 54 and the bloc around Gadi Eisenkot at 50, neither close to the 61 seats a Knesset majority requires. Tuesday night’s exit polls had split three ways: Kan 11 and Channel 13 tied at 51 to 51, Channel 12 with Netanyahu ahead 52 to 49, Channel 15 with 55 to 49. Official results are due November 4. After certification the president tasks the member most likely to assemble a majority, who then has 28 days to form a government and may take up to 14 more; if that fails another candidate is tried, and continued deadlock could force another election. The Tel Aviv 125 fell as much as 3.5 percent in early trading Wednesday, and the prediction market moved hard: Polymarket’s next-prime-minister contract, which priced Eisenkot at 62.1 percent on Tuesday morning, this morning stands at 44.0 percent for Netanyahu and 27.1 percent for Eisenkot.

Washington’s news was presidential rather than electoral. Three presidential documents appeared in the Federal Register: Executive Order 14438 on housing costs, Presidential Determination 2027-01 under section 303 of the Defense Production Act, and Proclamation 11074 adjusting imports of wind turbines. None of the three imposes a tariff, and each hands a directive to an agency. The equity indexes closed higher Tuesday, the S&P 500 at 7,722.60, up 0.60 percent, with the ten-year yield holding at 5 percent and the federal debt at $40.53 trillion after a one-day increase of $65.2 billion.

The administration and the rule of law

The Register carried 185 documents for October 27 and 28: four presidential documents, 23 rules, eight proposed rules and 150 notices. Most of the tail is the ordinary machinery of a Wednesday, information collections, advisory meetings and airworthiness directives.

The three substantive presidential documents share a method. Each identifies a problem the administration wants addressed, finds an authority that reaches it, and passes the work to a department. The fourth, a National Seafood Month proclamation, is ceremonial.

Executive Order 14438, Decreasing Housing Costs for the American People, directs the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency to have Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac build a pilot that reviews the single-family loans they own, guarantee or securitize with automated valuation models and cancels mortgage insurance proactively once a borrower qualifies. It also expands a title-acceptance pilot into a permanent nationwide program, so that eligible refinances may rely on automated title review instead of a lender’s title policy, and it requires any savings to be passed to borrowers and disclosed. A task force on manufactured housing, co-led by HUD and the FHFA with the Agriculture, Commerce and Veterans Affairs departments participating, must report recommendations within 180 days. The Agriculture and Veterans Affairs secretaries are directed to reduce the interest rates they charge on single-family loans made directly, subject to law and appropriations.

Presidential Determination 2027-01 rests on the national energy emergency declared in Executive Order 14156 and on section 303 of the Defense Production Act. It finds that domestic petroleum production, refining and logistics capacity, including exploration and production, gathering and transmission pipelines, storage and marine terminals, are essential to the national defense, and that industry cannot reasonably be expected to supply them in time because of constrained financing, long lead times, permitting and infrastructure bottlenecks and supply-chain limits. It then waives the requirements of section 303(a)(1) through (a)(6) under section 303(a)(7), the provision that lets the president shortcut the usual prerequisites when a shortfall would severely impair national defense capability, and directs the implementing department to make the purchases, commitments and financial instruments the expansion requires.

Proclamation 11074 invokes section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 and takes the negotiating route rather than the tariff route. It directs the Commerce Department and the Trade Representative to pursue agreements with trading partners, requires at least one update within 180 days, keeps the monitoring of turbine imports running, and states that nothing in it modifies the tariffs imposed under Proclamation 9704 or the related measures on steel, aluminum and copper. A future remedy is contemplated and not imposed.

Two more items are worth a line. The Office of Government Ethics published technical amendments to the executive branch financial disclosure and standards of conduct regulations, effective the same day (Executive Branch Financial Disclosure and Standards of Ethical Conduct Regulations). The Library of Congress opened a proposed rule on exemptions that permit circumvention of access controls on copyrighted works, the proceeding that decides which uses may lawfully bypass a technical protection measure (Exemptions To Permit Circumvention of Access Controls on Copyrighted Works).

The courts

The courts could not be read this morning. All three CourtListener queries, for Supreme Court opinions, D.C. Circuit opinions and new complaints in the District of Columbia, returned HTTP 401, so this edition cannot say whether the appellate courts filed anything in the window or how many complaints were docketed. The gap is the credential, not the calendar: the same collector answered this query yesterday and did not answer it today.

Of the five watched dockets, one moved. D.C. Preservation League v. Department of the Interior, 1:26-cv-00477, the East Potomac golf case, recorded seven entries on October 27, five minute entries and ECF 104 and 105 (D.C. Preservation League v. Department of the Interior). Beatty v. Trump, MSW Media, Inc. v. Department of Justice and the consolidated Phang appeal in the D.C. Circuit recorded nothing. The district-court Phang docket could not be read at all, because the collector’s request timed out, so whether it moved is unknown rather than quiet (Phang v. Blanche, 1:26-cv-01417).

Markets

Tuesday closed higher across the board. The S&P 500 finished at 7,722.60, up 45.83 points or 0.60 percent; the Nasdaq Composite at 26,477.811, up 308.43 or 1.18 percent; and the Dow Jones Industrial Average at 52,377.57, up 15.99 or 0.03 percent, all as of October 27. The divergence is the shape of the session: the Dow, price-weighted across thirty industrials, barely moved while the Nasdaq rose more than a percent.

Live prints this morning, stamped between 6:51 and 7:01 a.m. ET, put the VIX at 17.49, down 0.03; the ten-year yield at 5.009 percent, up 0.016; gold at $4,059.10 an ounce, down $15.50; front-month WTI crude at $101.35 a barrel, up $1.45 or 1.45 percent; and the dollar index at 102.423, up 0.104. Crude above $100 with the dollar firm is the combination against which the petroleum determination was written.

Treasury’s official curve for October 27 ran 4.70 percent at two years, 4.99 at ten and 5.30 at thirty, with the 2s10s spread at +0.29, three basis points narrower than October 26. The short end rose two basis points while the ten- and thirty-year eased one each, a flattening driven from the front rather than the long end.

Total public debt outstanding was $40,528,358,939,416 on October 26, up $65,207,042,167 from the prior business day, October 23. Debt held by the public was $32,635,294,814,294, and the intragovernmental share was $7,893,064,125,121. A one-day move of that size is a cash-management event as much as a borrowing one, and the figure to watch is whether it reverses.

The economy

The three monthly series carry no new release today. September’s consumer price index stands at 336.940 on the 1982-84 base, up from 334.980 in August and 333.918 in July, a one-month move of about 0.59 percent against August’s 0.32. Unemployment rose to 4.2 percent in September from 4.1 in August and July. Nonfarm payrolls totaled 159,044 thousand, a gain of 29,000 over August’s 159,015 thousand, after August’s 133,000 over July’s 158,882 thousand.

Read together they describe prices accelerating while hiring slows, and the September readings have not been superseded. The next test is the October release.

Elections and the midterms

Polymarket’s midterm pricing barely moved on Tuesday, though far more money changed hands. The House stood at 91.5 percent Democratic on $347,155 of twenty-four-hour volume and 8.5 percent Republican on $87,451, unchanged from Monday’s probabilities on nearly twice the volume. The Senate stood at 66.5 percent Democratic on $457,888 and 33.5 percent Republican on $293,927, again unchanged, with the Democratic contract drawing almost five times Monday’s $95,593.

The balance-of-power event priced the combinations separately: a Democratic sweep at 65.5 percent on $289,638, a Republican Senate with a Democratic House at 26.5 percent on $72,694, a Republican sweep at 7.5 percent on $213,710, and a Democratic Senate with a Republican House at 0.9 percent on $149,578. The residual “other” contract carried $455,439, the second-heaviest volume in the table, at 0.1 percent. Volume that large at a price that low is a market for people who want the tail, not a signal about the election.

In the state races, Democrat James Talarico held 67.5 percent in Texas against Republican Ken Paxton at 32.5, a point better than Monday; Republican Darline Graham Nordone stood at 74.0 in South Carolina against Democrat Annie Andrews at 25.5; and Democrat Abdul El-Sayed stood at 69.5 in Michigan, also a point better than Monday.

These are the venues’ prices, not this publication’s view, and a thin book is not a forecast.

The world

The Israeli count is the day’s largest event outside the country, and its arithmetic is the story. Likud leads the party tally at 27 seats, but seats are not the unit that forms a government. The Netanyahu bloc, made up of Likud, Shas, United Torah Judaism, Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit, reaches 54; the Eisenkot bloc, made up of Yashar, Together, Yisrael Beytenu and the Democrats, reaches 50. The Arab-led Ra’am and Joint List were projected at 16 to 19 seats combined, which would make them decisive, but Netanyahu has called such a coalition shameful and opposition figures have ruled it out as well, so the arithmetic that exists on paper does not yet exist in politics (Netanyahu or Eisenkot? Can you form Israel’s next coalition government?).

The markets read the deadlock immediately. The Tel Aviv 125 dropped as much as 3.5 percent in early trading Wednesday on the uncertainty (Israel’s stock market drops as exit polls show no clear election winner). Polymarket’s prime-minister market reversed outright: Eisenkot, priced at 62.1 percent on Tuesday morning, now stands at 27.1, and Netanyahu has moved from 27.5 to 44.0. That is what happens when a market built on surveys meets a count. Netanyahu remains caretaker prime minister while on trial on corruption charges, which he denies. The next fixed date is November 4, when official results are due; the coalition talks may run past it, and another election is a live possibility rather than a distant one.

Sources

Market, yield, debt and prediction-market figures were collected at 06:00 CT on October 28, 2026 from CNBC’s quote service (October 27 close for the indexes), the U.S. Treasury daily yield curve (October 27), FiscalData (October 26) and Polymarket’s Gamma API (twenty-four-hour volume). The BLS public API supplied the three series named above. The three presidential documents and the two rules cited above were read at federalregister.gov. CourtListener returned HTTP 401 for all three opinion and complaint queries, and the watched-docket feeds supplied only what is described above. Both Israel stories were fetched and are linked.

PRH | huffmanwrites.org | © Philip Huffman