Even if the war ended today, they would still need a bailout or suffer economic collapse. Their economy is out of position and they would not be able to ramp down military spending by much anyhow. B4 borrowers go bust, they have usually royally cooked the books so there’ll be massive hidden pain.

It will be interesting to see how much of the U.S.’ oversized IT and financial might was indeed propped up by the promise to defend Europe when need be. We may potentially be seeing much more robust action to reign in certain allowances.

I’m wondering what the infatuation of the German car industry is with ICEs is given that these cars are already outdated and will increase in price due to lower production runs. Could it be financial engineering in that they want to optically manage their exposure arising from leasing arrangements?

It’s not really clear whether the rest of the U.K. would get higher prices when all is added up. With locational pricing there will be less curtailment and it is easier to store electricity in Scotland and pump it south when transmission is available. It will also rejig demand economically.

I‘m for locational pricing. It would save billions and set the right incentives.

It depends on the local electricity mix and transmission capacity but prices may settle lower, especially when wind would get curtailed otherwise. But they should also lower prices in the rest of the U.K. because arbitraging time and location would be much more straightforward.

Electricity markets are by their physics locational, because electric potential is local and transitory. Forcing a number of markets onto the same, often undeliverable, settlement price is hugely inefficient due to curtailment in either direction and gaming. A huge waste of money.

Organisationally, the only way to avoid capital wastage would be to book all gas assets into a government owned unwinding company with clear targets to switch of branch by branch and the ability to convert laggards onto HPs. Otherwise there is too much of an incentive to perpetuate.

Are there use cases in which the final meters of gas grid could be used for steam or as piping for ground source heat pumps? Otherwise it is just wasted money.

The way Airbus was set up had very positive implications for the production process and cost as it forced participants to minimise dependencies and think about modular and distributed production. It inadvertently created a key competitive advantage versus Boeing.

There should be a discussion whether it is advisable to have privately owned depositories for government bonds and, if so, what supranational powers should be instated to regulate them. It is incomprehensible that tiny EC and Belgium should wield, once indemnified against legal risks, a veto.

Unless private investors write down a sizeable portion of their debt, nothing reasonable can ever happen. WCs with their massive, ballooning, inflation linked debt were always set up to fail, relying on a govt bailout. The peak financial engineering happened under Blair.

Caveat emptor.

Was this on Russian TV?

Hope that you will feel better soon.

There is no time for celebrations. But it is probably unrealistic to assume that the U.S. will return to the fold of Western nations in the near term and, when it does, only much diminished after a prolonged period of political and economic turmoil. European self-reliance will shorten long odds.

Putin and the U.S. will emerge from this episode weakened. Authority relies on the others’ perception of having power to shape events. Both have expended a huge amount of political capital and failed for the third time to coerce Europe. For the U.S., the latest episode may have costly consequences.

What is promising about RE investments is that they are cheaper, complimentary to other RE assets and faster to deliver than alternatives and can often be implemented in insular solutions, thus few cross dependencies. The greatest hindrance is govt capture by intense O&G lobbying.

And it’s not that liquidity conditions are naturally tight, if they were, then Meta wouldn’t have been able to issue $30bn only fair-weather repoable SPV gunk. Liquidity is ‘tight’ because of an insane amount of escalating, govt sponsored leverage propping up a biblical asset price bubble.

Looking at it naively. The Treasury issues some TBills to finance a massive government deficit and by some technical sounding acronym or another that TBIll finds itself on the Fed‘s BS, To some people that might look like printing money to finance the deficit as there are no other takers.