Oil

For once we are having an old-fashioned silly season, with no pandemic, no insurgency by the Taliban, no leadership election in the Tory party and no energy crisis – with the result that a few migrants moving onto a barge has become the main story of the week. Or at least we didn’t seem to have an oil crisis until Tuesday, when European wholesale gas prices suddenly surged by 40 per cent, from €30 per MWh to over €40 per MWh. It was a reaction, it seems, to a strike in Australia which has compromised the country’s exports of liquified natural gas (LNG). Since the Ukrainian invasion, Europe has become increasingly dependent

‘Crypto assets are commodities,’ said my neighbour at dinner. No they’re not, I replied, commodities are natural raw materials that have ultimate real-world uses. Crypto is merely a collection of blips in cyberspace to which adherents choose to attribute value. ‘Just like fiat currencies,’ my neighbour shot back. ‘What’s real about them? Aren’t they just an idea in the mind of central bankers?’ And off we went on a ding-dong debate. A pity the US Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Gary Gensler wasn’t there to offer his theory that bitcoin, crypto’s market leader, is big enough to be a commodity but that lesser imitators are ‘securities’ (that is, investments bought

I’d happily jump on the Telegraph bandwagon for the abolition of inheritance tax, even in the company of Liz Truss and Nigel Farage. The urge to provide a cushion of capital for children and grandchildren is an honourable one. Recipients of already-taxed cash from deceased relatives are arguably less likely to be burdens on the state in their own later lives, just as the state is unlikely to spend the same money, if confiscated, in efficient ways for the greater good. And to argue against inheritance is to put socialist hostility to wealth ahead of the worthy aim of family betterment. Enough said. The trouble with this campaign, however, is

Where next for house prices? Clearly, they’re going down as mortgage rates go up – and my forecast in May that they would shed ‘recent froth’ and then stagnate rather than plunge, has been entirely overtaken by events, or at least by Kwasi Kwarteng’s calamitous ‘fiscal event’ last month. Reverberations from the Chancellor’s debut continue apace, with more emergency bond-buying by the Bank of England despite news that the OBR-assessed forecast missing from his September speech will now be unveiled on 31 October instead of on 23 November. But even if the books can be cooked in a way that makes more sense than markets expect, hundreds of mortgage deals

Production will be cut. Supplies to the rest of the world will be curbed. And inflation will rise just a little bit higher. No one ever expected the oil-cartel Opec(+), led by Saudi Arabia, to be friendly to the West, or to help out when it was needed. Even so, its decision this week to effectively side with Russia, and to make the energy crisis even worse, may quickly backfire. In reality, Opec was already in long-term decline. Picking a fight with the US will just make that worse. It was certainly the kind of news the energy markets didn’t need. Just as it was getting over the loss of Russia’s crucial

Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng – keen to sharpen the City’s competitive edge, we’re told – wants to remove the legislative cap, imported from Brussels in 2014, that limits bankers’ bonuses to 100 per cent of their base salary, or up to 200 per cent with shareholder approval. That raises interesting questions. Was the cap a good idea in the first place? If not, why wasn’t it binned as soon as we left the EU? Is now the ideal moment to do so? And are bankers still a breed of greedy bastards? The answer to the first question is certainly not. This column called the cap a ‘boneheaded’ measure that would merely

How outraged should we be that Saudi Aramco has reported a world-record quarterly profit of $48 billion, representing a giant bonus from the global oil price spike provoked by the war in Ukraine? Well, that’s how the cookie crumbles when you’re sitting on oil reserves so abundant and so easily accessible that your marginal cost of producing the next barrel is less than $10 when the market price has just doubled to $130 – as it did in March, before settling back to around $95 today. And you might think that this recent price retreat is likely to continue as oil demand begins to shrink with the onset of recession

It will drain Vladimir Putin of funds for his war machine. It will bring down inflation. And it might even be enough to stop the global economy from tipping into recession. As President Macron put forward his wheeze for solving the energy crisis this week, he no doubt had plenty of persuasive arguments. He appears to have brought the rest of the G7 on board for his plan for a global cap on the price of oil. There is just one problem. Like most price controls, it is not going to work. Indeed. It will only make the crisis worse. Of course, everyone can see where Macron is coming from.

Stock markets are tumbling, but given the tide of economic news, that’s hardly surprising. The S&P 500 index dived into bear market territory – 20 per cent down since January – after a rise in US inflation for May. Our own FTSE indices reacted badly to an unexpected 0.3 per cent drop in UK GDP for April. Interest rate rises predicted on both sides of the pond this week will make investors jumpier still. So expect further falls in markets that have been driven by weight of cheap money to stay unnaturally high despite an increasingly bleak backdrop. And wait for the turn. When might that be? When investors think

After the Jubilee dream of a lovely lost Britain, back to reality with a face-slap: the reality of the £8 pint of beer, the £8-plus gallon of diesel and the death throes of a Downing Street regime that has no discernible answers to the cost-of-living crisis. All of which takes me back to some questions I’ve been pondering for a while: whether the UK faces higher inflation and a deeper downturn than the rest of the western world, if so why, and who we should blame. By way of caveat, let’s recall the shifting pattern of Covid statistics over time: just because the UK topped April’s G7 inflation table –

When Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine on 24 February there was a conceit that this might be the first war which the West could fight – and win – by sanctions alone. The EU’s latest efforts to stop importing Russian oil show just what a folly this was. Donations of military equipment to Ukraine are certainly helping to keep Russian forces at bay, but economic sanctions? That is another story. Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and gas is the product of years of ill-conceived energy policy Sanctions may be helping to lower living standards among Russian citizens, but they are still a long, long way from cutting off the lifeblood

BP’s ‘underlying’ first-quarter profit of $6.2 billion, compared with $2.6 billion in the first quarter of 2021, was a direct reflection of the surge in global energy prices. Coming 48 hours before polling day, it also looked like a gift-wrapped on-time delivery for Sir Keir Starmer and his claim that a windfall tax on ‘excess’ profits of North Sea oil and gas extractors would knock £600 off the energy bills of ‘those who need it most’. Perhaps anticipating the BP announcement, Rishi Sunak last week seemed to trim his opposition to a windfall tax, telling Mumsnet ‘of course that’s something I would look at’ if energy companies fail to invest

When sanctions were imposed on Russia there was a big exception: Europe was still buying and paying for oil – leading to a bizarre situation. The West was doing everything it could to help Ukraine while still sending Putin hundreds of millions of dollars a day. But how much was that revenue worth to the Kremlin? As sanctions began to hit Russia, the price of Brent crude (the oil benchmark) soared to $130 a barrel, the highest since the 2008 financial crisis: an increase of over 90 per cent. It’s fallen since then but today it’s still sitting between $107 and $115 dollars a barrel – well above where it had been weeks