Hell to Pay

Price spikes, empty shelves, energy cuts... and other signs on the road to ruin

Bill Bonner, reckoning today from Paris, France...

This morning’s headline in the Financial Times:

Four-decade high for US inflation fuels Fed fears over jobs recovery

Yes, dear reader. Inflation didn’t slack off in December.  

“US consumer price growth rose at the fastest pace in almost four decades in December… The consumer price index increased at a 7% year-on-year pace last month, a step up from the 6.8% rate registered in November and the biggest jump since June 1982.

The road to ruin includes many twists and turns. And there are plenty of signs along the way to mislead travelers.

It wouldn’t surprise us to see the inflation numbers moderate in the months ahead.  But the general direction of America’s decline is not likely to change. As we’ve explored in these pages, the people who control US public policy have an agenda.  

It includes spending a lot of money they don’t have (with much of it going into their own pockets)… and doing a lot of things that could have very unpleasant consequences. The switchover – from ‘dirty’ old fuel to clean, new fuel – is one of them.  

Here’s a headline from Reuters. We had to read it three times. Even then we weren’t sure what it meant:

Coal to make up 85% of total US power capacity to be retired in 2022

(Reuters) - Coal-fired plants will account for about 85% of total U.S. power capacity scheduled for retirement this year with natural gas and renewables taking a greater share of the supply, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said on Tuesday.

One of our themes here at the Diary is that the feds are cruisin’ for a bruisin’ by meddling in the energy industry. Fossil fuel is what makes modern civilization possible. It keeps the trucks on the road and sustains 7.9 billion people. Take it away suddenly… or clumsily… and there will be Hell to pay.  

But the word ‘clumsily’ was practically invented to describe the way the government does things. It bullies. It bumbles. It makes the proverbial bull in the china shop look like a ballerina.

Normally, the energy ‘market’ adapts to conditions on the ground, with thousands of producers responding to delicate, real-time price signals in order to furnish 600 quadrillion Btus of energy per year.  

But when politics and inflation get involved, there is bound to be trouble. “Supply chain disruptions,” for example. Price spikes. Shortages. Cut-offs. Mistakes. Failures. Here’s the news from Berlin:  

Thousands of people in the east of Berlin had to get by for hours on Sunday evening without heating and without warm water – with outside temperatures of around three degrees Celsius. A brief power outage at the state’s own electricity network operator Stromnetz Berlin had paralyzed the Klingenberg thermal power station in the Rummelsburg district in the afternoon, as the energy supplier Vattenfall announced. The power plant owned by the company had to shut down.

Europe is leading the way. Since 2,000, in the Old World, oil production has dropped in half. Nuclear reactors are decommissioned. And the price of a gallon of gasoline, when we filled up the tank yesterday near Paris, was about $7. 

European Oil Production in Decline

(Source: Eurostat)

People don’t like running out of power. And they don’t appreciate it when their energy costs go up. In Kazakhstan, the president has given the order to ‘shoot to kill’ protestors. The back story is that after years of controlling the price of fuel, the government decided that it had enough… eliminated the price controls… and the price doubled overnight. This set off some serious objections… in which protestors set fire to the country’s parliament.

Meanwhile, back in the USA, CNN reports:

Grocery store shelves across America are wiped clean, and they're staying empty as stores struggle to quickly restock everyday necessities such as milk, bread, meat, canned soups and cleaning products.

After contending with two years of a pandemic and supply chain-related problems, grocery stores still aren't getting the break they had hoped for.

We have no particular insight into any of these news stories. But our hunch is that they are connected to the new ‘activism’ of our leaders… and the corruption of our elites. A further guess is that we’ll see more of them.

Regards,

Bill Bonner

P.S. Uh oh… 

'Natural gas surges 14% as cold snap ahead is expected to boost demand,' reports CNBC. The continuous futures contract is up 30% so far this year after being up 47% in 2021.

The cold snap will fuel demand in the North East, where Natural Gas is the main fuel for electricity generation (and where a lot of people will be turning up the heat this weekend). Investment Director Tom Dyson reminded our paid readers to either read the transcript or listen to the audio of the hour-long conversation we had with Rick Rule and Byron King in late 2021.

That conversation - which we called the Winter Catastrophe - was about how investors can take advantage of political blundering and bad energy policy to benefit from rising energy prices in 2022. Gain access to the transcript by clicking on the link below.