Victoria Pulls out of Hosting Commonwealth Games

The International Energy Agency is warning of another energy crisis, despite efforts by European countries to fill their storage sites to the brim. Despite the frantic decoupling efforts from Russian energy supplies over the last fifteen months, Europe still relies on Russia for around 10% of gas via pipelines and other supplies in liquified form.  Europe are targeting 90% full stockpiles by November and that will almost certainly be achieved, with them being around 80% at the moment. However, if we were to see all three of the following; Russia turn off supplies, a cold winter, LNG in high demand from elsewhere in the world, then Europe might emerge from winter with as little as 20% in the tank, which would be a recipe for severe price action. As Europe suffers under the heat dome, gas prices are some 90% lower than they were around this time last year. The FT has more (ft.com/content).

Germany’s big three car manufacturers have come out with some sobering numbers; production remains 20% lower than pre-pandemic levels. The industry may well still be recovering from the rollercoaster of the pandemic, where manufacturing was shut, demand fell off a cliff and then roared back to life, but was blighted by supply chain and semiconductor issues. These might be fixed now, but in that time we’ve seen consumers looking closely at their spending, particularly in electric vehicles where these companies have invested heavily and orders are down between 30-50% versus last year, and also competition from China in the EV market is starting to hurt – even in the German home market, where Geely and Nio have made up 7% of EV sales in the first half of this year. Of course, falling demand means either cutting production or cutting prices, both routes would lead to either job losses in Germany and the sector currently employs around half a million people and generates around 400bn EUR in revenues.

A YouGov poll has indicated that around 51% of Britons would vote for the UK to rejoin the EU, its highest level since the referendum. The number of people who would now opt to region the bloc has risen 11 percentage points since January 2021, when the UK officially ended the transition period and formally left the EU. Back then some 81% of those who had voted to leave said they would still vote to leave the EU, while 9% would have changed their vote.

Meanwhile, according to last week’s poll, 32% of respondents said that they would vote to remain out. This came as 70% regarded the government’s handling of Brexit badly. According to Bloomberg “the findings reflect growing disillusionment among British voters about Brexit, which triggered years of divisive debate in Parliament before the UK finally left the bloc.”