Ellen pollack, and there are so many stories in this weeks issue. Lets start with markets and finance. Ellen it looks like opec has made a deal to cut production. It has been a lot of arguing backandforth about that for years and this is the first time they agreed to cut production in eight years. Carol it is a big deal. Ellen saudi arabia has typically not wanted to cut production and now does. Hoping that prices will go up and iran, which is usually the other way has almost switched positions, but they seem to be in agreement. It looks like Oil Production will go down and we have to see what happens with prices. Carol saudi arabia and iran have different views. , you take arks look a the war of free speech on line. Lets take a look at that. Ellen there is a classified ad site called backpage that makes a lot of money from sex ads, a lot of money from sex ads. I have taken it over from other places that have stopped running sex ads. There is sex trafficking, and prostitution. The sheriff in illinois, he has made it a mission to provide a stop to this. He asked visa and mastercard to stop allowing these vendors to use the cards and they agreed. Now there is a fight about it because backpage says this is our First Amendment right and you are trying to interfere with our First Amendment right. There is part of the Communications Act which actually says that internet providers cannot be held liable for stuff that third parties have put on their site. It is a big test of that part of the Communications Act and it may go to the supreme court. Carol an issue of free speech online. Ellen there are lots of internet providers who basically backpage, even though they do not necessarily like the sex ads. Carol lets talk about companies and industries. About the a story state of missouri. State becoming the sue me state. Ellen plaintiffs lawyers are always looking for a good place to file Product Liability cases, and it turns out that the courts in missouri are being friendly to these cases and it is in part because they allow you to sue with a group of people as long as only one person is from that district. You have people in california suing alongside people from missouri, and there are other rules that make it friendly. Litigationt tourists. These lawyers focusing on this area. This has happened before and then laws changed and they go elsewhere. Carol they have gotten favorable rulings and that is why they are being brought there . Ellen some of the biggest rewards over the last year have been in those courts. Carol lets talk about the cover story on computerized voting. We are six weeks away from the election. Ellen it is a really interesting story because there has been lots of talk, can the Voting Machines be rigged, will there be Cyber Attacks . What we say is the real problem with Voting Machines which may not end up throwing an election is that these machines are incredibly outdated. Carol and these are new machines that were put in 10 or 15 years ago . Ellen in 2000, after the big controversy with hanging chads. The federal government provided all this money so localities could upgrade their machines, but the software in those machines are incredibly out of date. They rely on versions of windows that are not supported anymore. There are all kinds of problems. Its like, you buy a new phone every couple of years, but these machines are softwarebased, are really old. Carol we get a rundown for mike riley. Mike almost all of the country has moved to electronic voting probably because congress created big incentives for them to do that in terms of money. They gave nearly 4 billion to transition states around the country to computerized voting so by 2006, everybody but new york had basically thrown out their old machines. Now it is sort of when we go into a voting booth, that is what we do, vote by computer. Many of those states no longer even use a paper ballot or receipt. It is all about zeros and ones. Technology is taht in a world where what we hold in our pocket is a Pretty Amazing technological marvel. What we will vote on is out of date and obsolete, and that has to do with the market of voting technology. It is only about 300 million a year. To give you a little perspective apple makes 300 million in 12 hours. As a result, there are various small players, dominion which is a canadian company, these are the companies that can control the technology. Createt they did is voting systems that are really hard to use, not wellengineered. Part of this was after a move in 2002 to throw 4 billion at this problem so a lot of stuff went to market before was tested or engineered perfectly well. 2016, we areard in about to vote in an incredibly contentious election. All of our technology is out of date. It wasnt that welldesigned to begin with. It is old and full of bugs. Carol you tell your story through some voting that went on in Shelby County last year to elect city officials. There were a lot of problems with that vote that used computerized machines. Mike those problems have increased since they moved to computerized voting and these machines in 2006. Since then, each every election there has been a lawsuit claiming some kind of foul up. We use the election of 2016 as an example, and it was just chaos. The returns were coming in late. They were using two databases that were not merging. The returns were hours late. They were trying to post this to the web using a new software that did not work well. At the end of the night, they thought they had fixed all the problems, thought they had all the votes correct, but Somebody Just happened to be at a polling station in south memphis and took a picture of a poll tape. It is basically how the votes were cast on the machines at that precinct. Carol you are talking about the Computer Programmer benny smith . Mike correct. Benny happens to be at the church, and he takes a picture of the poll tape and it has got the number of votes that are cast at that precinct that night. A week later the official results come out that have been tabulated through the computerized software, and 40 of the votes in that precinct are gone, they simply just not there. That starts a chain of events where benny and activists in memphis try to figure out what happened to the vote. There is a lot of suspicion and fear that there is nefarious activity going on, but really what happened in the end is the system itself probably just did not work very well, and the computer did not process the vote. Carol turning the potential hazards of computerized voting into cover art was done by robert vargas. Robert we found this one warehouse that had a bunch of decommissioned machines of a similar model to the one still in circulation. It. E decided to shoot we set up kind of a clean screen, seamless background, shot it straight on in this cynical way, and did the headlines from there. Carol the scene definitely has a personality. Robert we did not end up giving it much personality in our final execution. We did the simple treatment for that and with an asterix, and that leads you to the punch line, if you will. Carol you have got to go get in close but there are some great nuggets of that story. Robert from afar it looks pretty mundane so it just looks like a voting machine with an i voted sticker. Carol you guys do a lot of covers that are people on the covers. Is it tough when you do Something Like this . Robert it presents an interesting challenge. Like, we definitely couldnt have ran this with a headline. Carol Voting Machines do not work. Robert hopefully it will be a little unexpected. Carol prostitutes, spies, and a billiondollar deal gone wrong. Goldmantell you how for 1. 3ok libya billion dollars. The tight rope fed chair janet yellen forced to walk and what might be chinese hackers next target . Carol welcome back to Bloomberg Businessweek. I am carol massar. You can find us on radio on a. M. 1200 in boston, 99. 1 fm in washington, d. C. In the Global Economic section, the challenges that fed chair janet yellen faces from the central bank and donald trump. You write about the president ial debates and something specifically that donald trump said about janet yellen. That she is political. Carol janet yellen . He is trying to pin that word on her like he did lying to ted cruz. On jeb bush. Y makenow, trying to that stick. Carol is the fed a Political Organization, it is not the first time somebody has said that. What you mean when you say it is a Political Organization . They are not explicitly political. Like the democratic party, the republican party, even the president. They do not take into account, they do not try to get some candidate to win or lose and yet i think it is fair to say that in one sense, they are political, not in their motivation but in their outcome. What they do effects, clearly effects the economy which in turn effects the climate of the parties. Carol there is going to be winners or losers whether the fed does something or not. As of this week there was about a 49 chance according to the Financial Futures market, that the fed would raise in december, that only a 17 chance they would raise in november. Why the big difference . One reason could be there is no press conference scheduled after the november meeting and the fed tends to like to do its rate increases after a press conference. So janet yellen can explain more clearly what is going on. It is happening six days before the election and the fed does not want attention brought to itself by raising. Carol it is kind of dammed if it does and dammed if it doesnt. If the fed decided to raise rates, that would have some political impact and if it does not, that will too. I think it is in the market. I think the prices in the market reflect the idea that the fed would refrain from acting in november but there are people i talked to for my article including a guy at Barclays Capital who said, aside from the press conference effect, that the fed would do, if the time is right for raising, it would raise. Carol how chinas Hacking Community is growing and what may end up being its next target . I spoke with jeff musket. You edited the story and it is not about chinese hackers hacking into other foreign entities but domestically. There is a lot of hacking going on in china by chinese hackers. Jeff according to fireeye theres about 400,000 chinese hackers targeting domestic individuals or corporate targets taken about 15 billion of the economy. Carol that is a lot and a lot of it seems to come from, you guys write it could come from a former employee or current employee of a company. Jeff pricewaterhousecoopers projects that maybe half of the target hacks on domestic individuals and corporations in china are carried out as inside jobs. One of the more prominent hacks in china is when the personal information and addresses of communist leaders and Business People in china, it seems according to the police department, it looks very much like an inside job. Carol it is interesting what you guys cover in Bloomberg Businessweek, everyday peoples information is being tapped into in china. Jeff for many people in china, their first access to the internet came not through a pc with a secured network but a phone. It is more common in china than it is in u. S. Or europe for funds being set up to log on to public wifi automatically, and offered without verifying they are secure. Carol what is the Chinese Government doing . Jeff unfortunately for the people, the Chinese Government is making it tougher to encrypt data in a secure way. The Cyber Security law that has gone through two rounds in legislature there and will likely be passed into law by the end of the year, among other things strengthens the limits on data that you can keep encrypted in china or limits on data that you are able to keep in servers outside the mainland. The Chinese Government has also recently stepped up its enforcement of a ban on platform micro chips because things that are basically the encryption standards in the rest of the world. Carol when the truth hurts too much, the greek whistleblower athens wants behind bars. Powerful useost the powerless. Bloomberg next on businessweek. Carol welcome back to Bloomberg Businessweek. I am carol massar. A profile of a former imf economist hiding from greek authorities in maryland and the Treasury Department is trying to protect him. David gura and i spoke to matt phillips. David how did this unknown economist come to get a big job in greece . Matt this guy spent most of his career, working as an obscure economist in the bowels of the imf in washington and he saw that his home country of greece, was at the epicenter of this and was teetering toward bankruptcy. He felt the desire, the patriotism to apply to a job that had been posted. They needed for the first time, an independent statistician to scrub the countrys economic statistics. Six years later, in 2010, rather than being seen as a hero who helped save his countrys economy and put it back on the track to growth, he is vilified as public enemy number one. David he applied online, i find it astonishing. Carol what happened though, was when he went to greece he started going through the data found a lot of problems. Matt we know this story that for years and years greece have been cooking their books, making their debt looks smaller as a ratio to gdp and their economy look better. It did not really come to light until everything started to fall apart in 2009 and 2010. What he found was pretty egregious. I mean, things were kept off the books, things were completely misstated and there was lots of entrenched interest to keep the secret. He drew a hard line in the sand and said, this is not what we are going to do, i am not going to do things as they were done in the past and give authority to the Statistics Authority the ability to approve his stats after he released them. He released them. The eu never had a problem with his stats which is interesting because they have lots of problems with his predecessors statistics. David this is a fiveyear term and by the end he is carrying a gun in a briefcase to work. When did things turn for this guy . Matt pretty quickly, i mean, within a month or so of when he arrived in 2010 he noticed his email was being hacked. He was getting death threats. This is a guy who is a black belt in jujitsu. He is a large man physically, a very black and white kind of guy. The fact that he felt endangered physically and that he felt he could not be in the country anymore says a lot about the pressure he was under. Carol he was in charge of the greek statistical office. There was a board that oversaw it and they were upset that he put out information before they okayed it, but isnt that the whole idea . This is supposed to be an independent organization and this is what got greece in trouble in the first place. Matt you wonder why they okayed this in the first place, but they expected to happen but they got in a lot of ways the right guy for the job. There were a lot of entrenched interests who felt otherwise. Carol the new most important meal of the day, lunch. I spoke to bret begun about the new power lunch. Bret we have various places to go in 18 different cities in america, and a power lunch in 2016 is different from the power lunch 10 or 20 years ago. Carol it is not a bunch of martinis anymore. Bret unfortunately not. That is not the most productive way to spend your day so people are not going out for steaks and martinis anymore. They are also not always going to places that have white tablecloths. The whole game has changed. Carol what do you want in a power lunch . Bret one, it is ok to be a little bit inventive. If you take clients to a place they did not expect it shows you are taking some chances, maybe the dreaded thinking outside the box phrase, but you might be doing that. It shows you can take someone somewhere and say, they do a fried avocado sandwich here. At client will probably look avacadosay, fried sandwich . It turns out to be awesome, it actually is going to help you more than just saying your options are filet mignon or new york strip. Carol what about price point . Bret if you are on an expense account, great, but i think it shows if you can be a little bit frugal about it. You do not have to have a steak and martini, you can have sandwiches or salads. Meetings are a lot more casual in general. Carol you take us all around the country. Any favorites . Bret in new york city in Grand Central terminal, it puts you right at the place you can take a train so if you have a client that needs to get to westchester or long island and they are right there, they will probably be happy. Carol that is the other thing, timing. You want places you can get in and out. Bret you want to show people you are thinking about their time and do not necessarily want a three hour lunch. Carol what the sec labels as the biggest visa scam in history. Voters head toward the reckoning day, election day. Carol welcome back to Bloomberg Businessweek, i am carol massar. The scam that had foreigners paying half a Million Dollars for a chance of the american dream. A Pro Sports Team is embracing their lgbt fans and 1 trillion purchasing power. It is all ahead on Bloomberg Businessweek. Carol i am here with editor in chief ellen pollack and there are so many must reads. Your International Cover story is about Goldman Sachs and their involvement with libya. Ellen it is really quite a tale. Basically, once sanctions were lifted from libya, they decided they wanted to invest. They wanted their