Wednesday Morning Links

Active rigs: 188 (nice)

RBN Energy: CBR at the Gulf Coast

In the short term midstream companies with crude-by-rail unloading terminals at the Gulf Coast can deliver cheaper light sweet crudes from the Midwest and West Texas. Once new pipelines come online to deliver that crude direct to Houston that price advantage will disappear. At that point rail terminal operators need to diversify their business to survive.  Today we look at the fate of Texas Gulf Coast rail terminal operators.

WSJ Links

Section D (Personal Journal):

Section C (Money & Investing):

Section B (Marketplace):
How the wheels came off for Fisher. A stand-alone post elsewhere. 

Section A:

• School's reserve fund draws ire. Wow. The University of Wisconsin has amassed a $650 million "reserve fund" unbeknownst to lawmakers. Wow. 

The rainy-day fund came to light when several lawmakers who are also accountants began digging into the system's books and found hundreds of cash reserve accounts that weren't readily discernible in the budget. The exposure of the money—spread across the system's 26 campuses—prompted a legislative hearing Tuesday in which lawmakers spent two hours dressing down UW System President Kevin Reilly.

David Giroux, the spokesman for the university system, said that while "there is understandable concern about why these cash balances have grown," the system's leaders think it is prudent to maintain a hedge against the increasing volatility of educational funding. A shrinking slice—now less than 20%—of the school's roughly $5 billion budget is supplied by the state. As administrators have necessarily grown more entrepreneurial in their hunt for money, they have kept a greater reserve on hand in case the school hits a rough patch, he said.

• President's party frets about his powers of persuasion.

Democratic strategists, lobbyists and some Capitol Hill aides see last week's defeat of the gun-bill amendments as a worrisome sign that Mr. Obama hasn't found a way to bridge the partisan divide in Congress—or even that he has a sufficiently firm hold on the more conservative members of his own party.