Oddbean new post about login | logout At least they are doing everything they can to raise energy prices 😆
You joke, but they are, and that caused some big energy consumers to leave Germany (deindustrialization) and everyone else to be more frugal or invest in energy efficiency, so we use less and less energy and the prices are now falling.
https://www.pv-magazine.de/2024/04/03/energieverbrauch-faellt-2023-auf-historischen-tiefststand/ https://image.nostr.build/194bdc05cead04282623fcb4c3be08f5659a46190042a827deb7663e256fddd2.jpg
Green Walhalla on the horizon...
In the end, it was inevitable. An aging population consumes fewer resources. Deflation is normal.
I would suggest causality runs the other way. Populations with fewer resources / less security than their parents marry and reproduce less and later. David Ricardo was writing about that before 1800...
German demand is falling faster than supply is.
Yes.
That must make Chinese policymakers very happy. Russia's too, outside Gazprom. Prospective immigrants, not so much. But maybe "if its free, its Halal"...
Russia's newer pipelines will be less profitable than their EU ones. The Chinese know that they can get a discount because the West isn't bidding, anymore.
True, but their hit to margins won't be anything like the mark-up you guys are paying for LNG. China, Japan and Korea are buying our gas at hefty price increases compared to previous years, so Russia alone isn't able to meet China's increase in demand..,
China is declining, tho, and India is going heavy on coal and nuclear.
China is going through some political stupid at the moment, but its so opaque and centralised its impossible to know which way it will move afterwards. India have their own coal and nuclear fuels, they'd be mad not to use them. They do import our gas, though. In my grandfather's day, Australia was the world's lowest-cost aluminium producer, and a major steelmaker. All gone. Politics is upstream from economics...
