the energy producer and distributor Energie Wien, a top 50 Austrian company, owned by the City of Vienna, has been playing the financialisation game and now needs a government bailout.
this state-owned company sold forward three (!!!) times its energy output, and must compensate counterparty (pay margin) on every day market price goes above price it agreed to sell at - margin calls are now estimated at EUR 6bn.
why? clever boys wanting bonuses.
as @bauhiniacapital explained to me yesterday, there is some legitimate positioning to maximise profits around the price cap imposed on EnergieWien, but selling three times your output is not that, it's pure speculation.
you know your macrofinancial regime is dying when the World Bank has to point out the obvious
'buoyant' is not the word I'd use to describe a room full of people willing to inflict deep recessions on everyone but the 1% in order to preserve the institutional status-quo
buoyant Captain welcomes once in a lifetime iceberg
New Keynesians out-hawking each other, enthralled by the expectations ferry imf.org/en/News/Articl…
the 'natural' interest rate is the Schweitzer cheese in monetary theory: so full of conceptual holes you can drive a truck full of public debt through it.
increasingly convinced that the famous @Isabel_Schnabel speech on fossilflation was the optimism of a bygone era when we told ourselves that orderly decarbonisation without radical institutional change was possible.
fascinating that investors - at least the ones talking to FT - think the ECB is no longer acting as sovvies market maker of last resort.
TPI doesnt even feature in this piece on drying liquidity (ahem) in Eurozone sovereign bond markets
Wake up to the sound of 'bankers whining', Europe must be doing something right. ft.com/content/084b39…
Reminder BlackRock and other carbon financiers lobbied Brussels hard against double materiality, against reporting, and eventually being penalised for the destructive climate impact of their lending
Bankers are whining using the usual two 'Panda bears killed by your mean regulation' - SMEs and #CapitalMarketsUnion.
Every single time.