YouSaid · the spoken record

Helen Thompson

lines on the record: 70
first: 2023-10-16
most recent: 2023-10-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We say nuclear is expensive. I don't even begin to know enough to make an analysis of that, but I just observe that folks who make claims about the expensiveness of relative sources of energy relative to another, it's how you measure it, right? For example, 10 years ago, I was reading Bloomberg articles about how wind is cheaper than natural gas. I would think that if that was truly true, that we wouldn't be using, no one would be using natural gas at all now. Again, it's how you measure it. And I also noticed the price of uranium, you know, a huge bull market in uranium from 2000-2007. Then we had a bear market, price of uranium went down. How much, when you say it's expensive is in building the plant, getting sure, having people, compliance people work with regulators, and in other words, not the true economic cost versus the actual cost of uranium. Because uranium went down from 2007 to 2019, 2020.”
2023-10-16 · Forward Guidance · The Future Of Financial Repression | Helen Thompson on Energy, Capital Controls, and the Federal Reserve · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By anti nuclear advocates, is to say that nuclear power is incredibly expensive. It is. I think it's fair to say that there's something about nuclear power and France's rather singular commitment to it from the 70s that might be explained by what might be called the vanity of the French state and the willingness to spend lots of sums of money on these huge technological projects. But the attraction of it is that if you spend the money and it is long-term money that you're spending and long-term in terms of building things, then it delivers electricity all the time and not on an intermittent basis like solar and wind do without storage capacity.”
2023-10-16 · Forward Guidance · The Future Of Financial Repression | Helen Thompson on Energy, Capital Controls, and the Federal Reserve · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From him that France should at least radically reduce its dependence upon nuclear power. So you kind of see some convergence, obviously the French aren't about to get rid of all their nuclear reactors, but some of the maintenance problems that materialized in 2022, you might put down to the fact that Olan was a lot less committed to nuclear power than his predecessors. And Macron was in the same position when he first came in to power. But over the last few years, he's very much gone in the opposite direction and particularly I'd say so since the invasion of Ukraine. So he's now very much that nuclear power to be the center of France's decarbonized electricity and that simply isn't the case in Germany. Quite the opposite. Now you can argue, and this is obviously part of the arguments that are made.”
2023-10-16 · Forward Guidance · The Future Of Financial Repression | Helen Thompson on Energy, Capital Controls, and the Federal Reserve · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Front's meanwhile had a number of former colonies, not least Niger, where to this day, about 25% of the uranium from French nuclear power comes from. So whilst nuclear power didn't solve the, if you like, foreign resource dependency problem for West Germany, it a little bit more did for France. Now, I think if you move on then to the 2010s, obviously it's Fukushima, the reactor, the Japanese reactor that pushes Merkel into making the decision to end German nuclear power within 10, 11 years from that. You actually see, particularly under Francois Hollande, the French, the then, well, he became French president in 2012, actually a quite strong commitment.”
2023-10-16 · Forward Guidance · The Future Of Financial Repression | Helen Thompson on Energy, Capital Controls, and the Federal Reserve · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Environmental is about the waste, nuclear waste is about nuclear waste and what happens to it when the reactors are finished essentially. And Chernobyl disaster in 1986 intensified the anti-nuclear sentiments in West Germany. I think it's also true, though, that there's a significant geopolitical difference between France and West Germany in the 70s and 80s West Germany found that it had to worry in the 70s about where it got enriched uranium from, including because”
2023-10-16 · Forward Guidance · The Future Of Financial Repression | Helen Thompson on Energy, Capital Controls, and the Federal Reserve · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a number of different things that have gone on here. If we just take the German case where the anti-nuclear movement's being the strongest is if you go back to the 1970s, when there was a big push for nuclear power, it wasn't the origins of the push of nuclear power, obviously, but that's a decade when the French really commit very, very strongly to making nuclear power central to the generation of electricity in France. What you see in Germany, in West Germany, is it then was a quite significant, if you like, civil protest movement around it on environmental grounds, on safety grounds. And that's very much, in a way, the origins of the West German then now German Green Party and the Chernobyl nuclear.”
2023-10-16 · Forward Guidance · The Future Of Financial Repression | Helen Thompson on Energy, Capital Controls, and the Federal Reserve · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Energy, and that's meaning that it means that it's become quite hard to agree common policies across quite a range of specific energy areas because the Germans don't want nuclear power in and the French insist that it must be in because for the French under Macron anyway past the first few years of his presidency he's very much committed to maintaining to have what he calls a nuclear renaissance for the French nuclear power industry in Germany's case obviously the nuclear power stations have reactors have all been shut down now”
2023-10-16 · Forward Guidance · The Future Of Financial Repression | Helen Thompson on Energy, Capital Controls, and the Federal Reserve · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Heard of for like about for several decades before that there was an issue about the alternatives and how in OneSearch reliable that they were for one reason or another. So whatever the intention and whatever the desire to get away from either fossil fuel energy or in the German case to get away from nuclear is the actual reality of doing that turns out to be significantly more complicated than that. If you then look at it in terms of the European Union and the European Union's energy future where a generation of electricity is concerned, what has now happened is that there's a real impasse between a group of states led by France and a group of states led by Germany about whether nuclear power should be part of green.”
2023-10-16 · Forward Guidance · The Future Of Financial Repression | Helen Thompson on Energy, Capital Controls, and the Federal Reserve · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Decarbonized electricity is concerned where I should say solar and wind decarbonized electricity. It's not simply a question of capacity because at the moment we're not in a position where large scale storage of electricity generated by solar and wind is possible. Meanwhile on the nuclear side, one of the things that was going on in Europe last year was that the French were having particular problems with maintenance with their nuclear reactors. So for a good part of 2022, French nuclear power output was about 50% of what it would usually be. So usually France would be an exporter of electricity to other European countries including the United Kingdom. But during the course of 2022 is that it was a significant net importer at times and actually the UK was exporting that electricity to France which had been”
2023-10-16 · Forward Guidance · The Future Of Financial Repression | Helen Thompson on Energy, Capital Controls, and the Federal Reserve · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is quite a complicated story. I think that there's no doubt that there has been a push to increase the capacity of basically the solar and wind capacity for generating electricity in Europe. And whilst obviously there was a drive for that before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, that the war intensified that and has led to increased capacity. But as we know with solar and wind, increased capacity doesn't necessarily mean increased output. So I think it's for the second or the third quarter of last year for the UK. You can see quite a sharp increase in solar and wind capacity during the quarter. But actually the output is down on the quarter because the weather conditions are not sufficiently conducive for solar and wind output to be High. So where”
2023-10-16 · Forward Guidance · The Future Of Financial Repression | Helen Thompson on Energy, Capital Controls, and the Federal Reserve · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some European nations $60. Well, it was supposed to be, it was supposed to be imposed by everybody, but there were some exemptions for it because the issue for a number of European countries probably most significantly Austria and Hungary of being landlocked so that they're dependent upon the pipeline oil that was coming that way was still allowed under these arrangements.”
2023-10-16 · Forward Guidance · The Future Of Financial Repression | Helen Thompson on Energy, Capital Controls, and the Federal Reserve · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Russian exports to India, in particular China to some extent, but really very much to India have gone up quite considerably. And then it's refined in India and China into petroleum products that are then sold back into European countries. And the fact that the oil sanctions such as they are have basically been rounded price cap tied to shipping insurance essentially tells you in itself that even the people who are keenest on sanctions against Russia know that the world can't actually get by without Russian oil exports, whether they be crude or petroleum products. And if they could, then oil would be sanctioned. What the sanctions were trying to do, though they don't look now like they're succeeding, is to try and put a cap on the revenue that Russia could gain from its exports of oil.”
2023-10-16 · Forward Guidance · The Future Of Financial Repression | Helen Thompson on Energy, Capital Controls, and the Federal Reserve · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Constructed during the course of 2022. There's no doubt that Russia is making a move. I mean, it had started this before the war, but it's now doubled down on that move to increase its capacity to sell gas by essentially maritime means rather than pipelines either under the sea or under land. When you go to oil, you can see that there's not really much difference in the volume of oil that's been exported from Russia since the war began. And part of the reason for that is that European countries might not be buying Russian crude or not at least as much.”
2023-10-16 · Forward Guidance · The Future Of Financial Repression | Helen Thompson on Energy, Capital Controls, and the Federal Reserve · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There has been more of a fall in the export of Russian gas than there has been in the export of Russian oil. But what is undoubtedly the case, which you're kind of hinting at, Jack, is that Russia has to some extent not anywhere near completely, compensated for selling less pipelined gas by selling more liquid natural gas. And indeed, it's got a new liquid natural gas port on the Baltic that it didn't have at the beginning. It wasn't open at the beginning of the war. And that port is used to export liquid natural gas to a number of European countries, not always like directly. So, for instance, the Germans are not insignificant consumers of liquid natural gas from Russia, but it comes via Belgium, particularly in Porta, Antwerp rather than directly into the sort of temporary floating ports that Germany”
2023-10-16 · Forward Guidance · The Future Of Financial Repression | Helen Thompson on Energy, Capital Controls, and the Federal Reserve · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The second of them is the amount of oil that the Biden administration ordered release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve about 180 million barrels, all together. So actually one way of looking at that might be say, well, the prices didn't come down so far, they didn't really much ever really go much under $70 a barrel if that's $75 a barrel, despite the fact that there was weak demand from the world's largest oil importer, the world's largest oil producer was using its strategic petroleum reserve. So I don't think that we should think that the energy problems where fossil fuel energy is concerned anywhere near over for European countries. And that's even leaving aside what might now happen given what's going on in the Middle East.”
2023-10-16 · Forward Guidance · The Future Of Financial Repression | Helen Thompson on Energy, Capital Controls, and the Federal Reserve · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because the Russians stopped providing the gas The pipelines, particularly through Nord Stream 1 before it was detonated in September of last year. So this isn't, I think anything like a straightforward European success story in dealing with the gas crisis. On the oil side, the prices peaked around May or June of 2022 and then came down. And then we've seen in the last few months that they've been back up again, sort of fairly steadily over the $90 a barrel level. I think that you can see two things that really explain why that they came down after the initial surge on Russia's invasion. The first of them is back to China, China's weak demand, given the conjunction of zero COVID policies and property sector problems that China had last year.”
2023-10-16 · Forward Guidance · The Future Of Financial Repression | Helen Thompson on Energy, Capital Controls, and the Federal Reserve · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“China's economy was relatively weak in 2022, so demand fell for that reason. Whether they were worried about what was happening in terms of European ability to force prices up. And then what the long-term implications of that would be about China's attitude towards gas. I think we can see this year that China is very much back in the market, even though the Chinese economy hasn't recovered as well as many hope that it would. I think that if China's back in the market, then that means that it's more difficult for European countries than it was during 2022. We should also bear in mind that for the first six months of 2022 at least, European countries were buying gas normally from Russia. I mean, there were no sanctions on the export of Russian gas. Those imports from Russia by pipelines came to an end.”
2023-10-16 · Forward Guidance · The Future Of Financial Repression | Helen Thompson on Energy, Capital Controls, and the Federal Reserve · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In this, because China's demand for liquid natural gas imports fell quite sharply in 2022, having risen very sharply in 2021 and caused a gas price shock before several months before Putin decided to invade Ukraine. China's demand then dropped in 2022, and it's not so clear whether it was because”
2023-10-16 · Forward Guidance · The Future Of Financial Repression | Helen Thompson on Energy, Capital Controls, and the Federal Reserve · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it found that it was shut out of those contracts because it was worth it for the companies to break the contracts, pay the penalties, and sell the gas to European countries in spot markets. So Germany began 2022, obviously, with no liquid natural gas imports. Indeed, it had no liquid natural gas ports to import the stuff. And yeah, it could use essentially its wealth to be competitive. in those spot markets that Pakistan would be shut out of. So it isn't just a question of good fortune where the weather is concerned. It's also a question of essentially the wealth of European economies protecting them in that competition between European countries and Asian countries. The thing that's a little bit more uncertain on the gas side, I think, is the role that China played.”
2023-10-16 · Forward Guidance · The Future Of Financial Repression | Helen Thompson on Energy, Capital Controls, and the Federal Reserve · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have to like separate this out a bit into questions about gas and questions about oil I think in terms of gas where the temperatures during the winter was obviously a crucial factor, what we can see is that the Europeans benefited from firstly good fortune, the weather, but they also benefited from their ability to force prices up in liquid natural gas markets and make it more difficult for a number of Asian countries in those markets, particularly Pakistan. So Pakistan beginning of 2022 had long-term liquid natural gas contracts with a number of liquid natural gas companies, Qatar, United States.”
2023-10-16 · Forward Guidance · The Future Of Financial Repression | Helen Thompson on Energy, Capital Controls, and the Federal Reserve · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT