The Zman warns that European bureaucrats are trying (perhaps “conspiring” would be a better word) to fix energy prices at higher levels for the long term.
In effect the EU is lending its citizens money to pay their utility bills, without telling them that they are creating a debt for them.
Example
Cornelius is paying $1000 a month right now. In the past, it was $200 a month, but the real price right now is $1500. That $500 is a debt that will be paid back when prices fall. So when the market price is back to $200, Cornelius will keep paying the $1000 rate until the deficit is made up.
The utilities will be able to use those future payments, plus interest, as security for additional borrowing right now. In other words, they are using this to create new debt instruments, which will profit the financial houses at the further expense of the people.
If wholesale prices do not return the old levels, then the utilities will face what is, in effect, a massive short squeeze. They will go bankrupt or require another bailout. Prices will never return to the old levels, so this trick is really just creating a bigger credit bubble in the future to solve the collapsing credit bubble in the present.
There’s more at the link.
Trouble is, this is merely a financial band-aid, not a solution. Europe and its citizens are already awash in debt. Creating more debt in this fashion is simply making that problem worse, while at the same time transferring it “off-the-books” to energy companies rather than individuals, in the form of what are effectively loans but are not described as such. This won’t solve the current debt crisis at all; in fact, it’ll make it worse, while punting the whole issue further down the road for future politicians and bureaucrats to deal with.
Our own government in the USA is doing the same thing. It passes grandiloquent-sounding schemes to spend trillions of dollars (which it does not have) on projects, proposals and plans that have little chance of working (because they’re politically correct rather than grounded in hard reality), but expects us to believe that the money they create out of thin air to fund such programs will never have to be backed up by hard assets, or repaid. Right now, the “full faith and credit of the United States” is looking very ragged about the edges. We’re effectively bankrupt – but nobody will admit it.
Sooner or later, that reality is going to overwhelm both Europe and the USA. It’s inevitable. When the financial storm breaks, you and I had better be hunkered down in as safe a place as we can find (or make) to endure it.
Peter
In Central Texas w/ PEC we're still paying an approx $20 monthly surcharge through Oct 2023 for one week of power during 2021's ice storms, even though our power was off for half that time resulting in busted pipes… For context, that's an increase of around 10% to our monthly bill.
Big picture, expensive energy will be a drag on the Europe's economies for at least a decade.
Maybe they are strip mining the assets of the USA before all goes to flame and smoke?
https://thesaker.is/the-case-for-a-new-american-civil-war/
Worth reading in full. Orlov has been scary accurate far too many times for me to ignore.
The Famine wars continue as we are eating Last Year's production and THIS Year's production looks pretty sketchy.
Yeah; it's just like the San Francisco Bay Bridge. When it was built the people were told there would only be a toll to us it until the bridge was paid for. California then started taking out debt, using the bridge as collateral. To this day, the bridge is not "paid for…" Is this wat's meant by "collateral damage?…"
of course we are bankrupt
There are too many serfs for the entitled class. They want to cull the herd. They only need so many servants.
Going to need more popcorn when this blows up in their faces!