At 12:01 a.m. Eastern today the list of Canadian goods that pay a 50 percent duty to enter the United States changed. Proclamation 11076, signed on October 23 and published in this morning’s Federal Register, removes one set of products from the additional duty imposed under Proclamation 11048 and adds another, and the change applies to goods entered for consumption or withdrawn from a warehouse at or after that minute. It is the second time the scope has been rewritten since the duties took effect. The duties stack on those imposed under section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, and they rest on section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, which caps them at 50 percent and lets the president amend, suspend or revoke a section 338 proclamation whenever he judges the public interest to require it. The document names neither the products it spares nor the products it adds; both lists sit in annexes.

A federal judge supplied the week’s sharper break. On Wednesday evening Judge David Carter refused the Justice Department’s request for a temporary restraining order that would have stopped California election officials from processing the ballots of 20,000 people federal officials describe as likely noncitizens, and the department has filed notice that it will appeal. The ruling landed days before the election, while mailed ballots are already being processed. Markets spent Thursday leaning away from risk. The Nasdaq Composite closed down 1.38 percent and the S&P 500 down 0.30; by seven o’clock Eastern this morning the VIX stood at 18.45, up 7.27 percent, and gold had fallen to $3,985.20 an ounce, below $4,000.

The administration and the rule of law

The Register carried 221 documents for October 29 and 30: one presidential document, 24 rules, eight proposed rules and 188 notices.

The duties were imposed by Proclamation 11048 on July 20, after a finding that Canada’s motor vehicle tariff scheme discriminates in fact against American commerce. Proclamation 11056 suspended their effective date for three days that August, after Canada said it would remove the discrimination. This morning’s proclamation states that Canada reneged on August 21, that the suspension lapsed at 12:01 a.m. on August 22, and that Proclamation 11065 modified the scope again on September 8. It then splits the product list in two: goods in Annex I, Part A lose the 50 percent duty, goods in Part B gain it. Section 338 also permits the president to exclude a country’s articles from importation altogether if the discrimination continues, a power the proclamation cites and does not use.

The rule with the longest reach is in education. Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization: The Secretary’s Recognition of Accrediting Agencies; Institutional Eligibility Under the Higher Education Act of 1965, as Amended; Student Assistance General Provisions revises the recognition of accrediting agencies and the institutional eligibility provisions of the Higher Education Act, together with the student assistance general provisions, in order to implement Executive Order 14279, Reforming Accreditation to Strengthen Higher Education. It is effective July 1, 2027, which leaves colleges and accreditors a single academic year to adjust.

Medicare Program; CY 2027 Changes to the End-Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) Prospective Payment System, Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) Dialysis Payment, and ESRD Quality Incentive Program updates the payment system for calendar 2027, the rate for dialysis furnished to patients with acute kidney injury, and the terms of the quality incentive program. It takes effect January 1.

The Drug Enforcement Administration used an interim final rule to place centanafadine in schedule III, effective today, with comments open through November 30. The Food and Drug Administration approved the drug on July 24 as Simtriyo, for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in adults and in patients six and older who weigh at least 20 kilograms.

At the enforcement end of the same department’s work, the Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force added three entities to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act Entity List, two of which appear on two separate sub-lists of the four the list consolidates.

The other notices are the ordinary machinery of a Friday: information collections, meeting notices and airspace amendments.

The courts

CourtListener’s search API answered this morning after returning HTTP 401 on the two previous runs of this report, so this edition can see what the last two could not. The Supreme Court and the D.C. Circuit filed no opinions in the window.

The week’s most consequential order was not in the District of Columbia’s docket. Judge denies DOJ bid to stop processing California ballots reports that Judge David Carter, in a 26-page order issued Wednesday evening, denied the Justice Department’s request for a temporary restraining order against the processing of ballots belonging to 20,000 individuals the department calls likely noncitizens. The order turned on timing and on the harm that follows from segregating a vote. “Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch,” Carter wrote. He ended with a sentence addressed to what the remedy would do rather than what it would prove: “Once a vote is segregated, lasting harm has occurred.” The department has filed notice that it will appeal.

Nineteen new complaints were docketed in the District of Columbia on October 29, and the captions show the shape of the day. The Center to Advance Security in America filed against two agencies under consecutive case numbers, the Department of State, 1:26-cv-03821, and the Department of the Air Force, 1:26-cv-03822. Two organizations sued the Department of Justice on the same day, Judicial Watch, 1:26-cv-03818, and American Oversight, 1:26-cv-03801. The National Treasury Employees Union sued the Internal Revenue Service, 1:26-cv-03812, and Trustar Bank sued the National Capital Bank of Washington twice on the same day. A caption names parties and a docket number. It does not say what the complaint alleges, and the docket pages as published carry no nature-of-suit field, so this report can say who sued whom and not why.

Of the five watched dockets, one moved. D.C. Preservation League v. Department of the Interior, 1:26-cv-00477 recorded nine entries on October 29, six of them minute entries and three docket entries numbered 112 through 114, a day after thirteen entries on October 28. The feed carries entry types and not their text. The Kennedy Center case, the two Epstein-files cases in the district court and the consolidated appeal recorded nothing.

Markets

Thursday closed lower. The S&P 500 finished at 7,720.39, down 23.59 points or 0.30 percent; the Nasdaq Composite at 26,184.724, down 365.127 or 1.38 percent; and the Dow Jones Industrial Average at 52,342.56, down 132.54 or 0.25 percent, all as of October 29. The gap between the Nasdaq and the Dow was 1.13 percentage points, wide enough that the session was not a uniform retreat.

This morning’s quotes, stamped between 6:50 and 7:00 a.m. Eastern, put the VIX at 18.45, up 1.25; the ten-year at 4.917 percent, down 0.072; gold at $3,985.20, down $46.20; front-month WTI crude at $104.24, up $2.24 or 2.20 percent; and the dollar index at 101.637, down 0.40.

Treasury’s official curve for October 29 ran 4.61 percent at two years, 4.98 at ten and 5.32 at thirty, with the 2s10s spread at +0.37. Against October 28’s 4.67, 5.05 and 5.37, every point fell, by six, seven and five basis points, and the spread narrowed by one. The thirty-year remains 34 basis points above the ten.

Total public debt outstanding was $40,551,054,852,362 on October 28, down $31,219,402,481 from the prior business day. Debt held by the public was $32,671,924,859,187 and the intragovernmental share $7,879,129,993,176. A one-day decline of $31 billion is a cash flow, not a policy.

The CNBC ten-year print and Treasury’s curve differ because they measure different things: 4.917 percent is a live quote at seven o’clock this morning, and 4.98 percent is the par yield curve’s close for October 29.

The economy

The three monthly series carry no release in this window, so the readings are the ones this report carried yesterday. September’s consumer price index stands at 336.940 on the 1982-84 base, against 334.980 in August and 333.918 in July, a one-month move of 0.59 percent. Unemployment is 4.2 percent in September, up from 4.1 in August and July. Nonfarm payrolls are 159,044 thousand, up 29 thousand from August’s 159,015 thousand. Prices are rising faster than they were at midsummer while hiring has slowed to a crawl, which is the combination that has kept the long end of the curve above five percent.

The next scheduled test is the advance estimate of third-quarter output, due before the election according to NPR, and economists expect it to show growth.

Elections and the midterms

Polymarket’s midterm contracts moved further toward the Democrats overnight, and the money behind the move grew. The House contract stands at 93.5 percent Democratic on $2,178,469 of twenty-four-hour volume, up a point from 92.5 on $1,067,937 the day before; the Republican side is at 6.5 percent on $2,691,604. The Senate contract is 68.5 percent Democratic on $471,526, against 67.5 on $157,899 yesterday, with the Republican side at 31.5 percent on $842,756.

The balance-of-power event moved with the chambers. A Democratic sweep stands at 69.5 percent on $717,873, up from 66.5; a Republican Senate with a Democratic House at 24.5 percent on $731,408, down from 27.5; a Republican sweep at 6.5 percent on $1,311,533; and a Democratic Senate with a Republican House at 0.7 percent on $261,499, down from 0.8.

In the states, Texas moved two points toward the Democrat. James Talarico stands at 70.5 percent on $433,700 against Ken Paxton at 28.5 percent on $610,055, where yesterday Talarico was at 68.5 and Paxton at 31.5. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed holds 76.5 percent on $242,252 and Mike Rogers 23.5 percent on $284,603.

These are the venues’ prices, not this publication’s view, and volume is not conviction. The Republican House contract again drew more money than the Democratic one at roughly a fourteenth of the price, which is a cheap tail trading heavily rather than a forecast that it arrives.

The world

The evacuation of Oleshky is under way, protected by a ceasefire that has held across the whole frontline region of Kherson since Tuesday, and both the Russian and the Ukrainian authorities have confirmed the movement. The BBC reports that the truce was brokered by the first lady, Melania Trump, that Russian sappers have been demining the road out since Tuesday, and that the arrangement has given Kherson its first days of peace since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022 (Oleshky residents leave Russian-occupied city as evacuation corridor opens).

Residents who want to leave have a four-hour window. A convoy of 25 buses will carry up to 750 people out by two o’clock in the afternoon, with ambulances for those who cannot walk. The exit route is the day’s quiet indictment. Ukrainian territory lies five kilometres from Oleshky, and the road to it runs through Russia and Belarus: evacuees travel first into Russian-occupied territory and on to the Russian city of Anapa, board a Russian government aircraft for Gomel, and cross by road into Ukraine’s Chernihiv region.

Several hundred residents have chosen to stay. Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets, and his Russian counterpart, Yana Lantratova, travelled to Oleshky together on Friday, and Lantratova posted video from the town showing residents sorted into two groups by destination. Meeting tearful residents in video on his own account, Lubinets named the difficulty as the number who declined to board: “The problem is that a lot of people are staying.” Russia said on Thursday that it had prepared dozens of tonnes of aid for those who remain, including food, medicine, hygiene products and fuel for generators.

One resident told the BBC she would not leave because the convoy would not take her animals. Another, now in Kyiv, described how the wounded reach the hospital in Oleshky, and its morgue: in garden wheelbarrows, because there is nothing else.

If the ceasefire holds through Sunday, the question it leaves is what happens on Monday, when the buses stop and the demined road closes again.

Sources

Market, yield, debt and prediction-market figures were collected at 06:00 CT on October 30, 2026 from CNBC’s quote service (October 29 close for the indexes), the U.S. Treasury daily yield curve (October 29), FiscalData (October 28) and Polymarket’s Gamma API (twenty-four-hour volume). The BLS public API supplied the three series named above. The Federal Register counts and the agency actions were read from the register’s own API, and the proclamation’s text from the document itself. The courts section draws on CourtListener’s search API and its watched-docket feeds, and on NPR’s report of the California order. The world section draws on the BBC’s report from Oleshky.

PRH | huffmanwrites.org | © Philip Huffman