>>> UK energy firms ScottishPower and E.ON said to be calling for the creation o

UK energy firms ScottishPower and E.ON said to be calling for the creation of a special fund that would allow the industry to freeze customers’ bills for two years and spread the cost of the gas-price crisis over a decade or more - UK press

- Propose multibillion-pound facility that would freeze household bills at £1,971 for two year

>>> China PLA Eastern Theater Command likely to conduct strong & powerful milita

China PLA Eastern Theater Command likely to conduct strong & powerful military operations in the waters & airspaces around the island of Taiwan as countermeasures to latest US lawmakers' visit to the island - Global Times

**Reminder: earlier on Aug 14th, US Congress delegation, led by Senator Markey, arrived in Taiwan on a two-day visit

***Link:

FT : Saudi Aramco breaks profit record on high energy prices

Saudi Aramco breaks profit record on high energy prices
The world’s biggest listed oil producers are posting blockbuster results as inflation bites consumers

Saudi Aramco broke its quarterly profit record set in May, as soaring energy prices driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine deliver windfalls to refiners.

Net income at the state-backed group rose to $48.4bn in the second quarter, a 90 per cent year-on-year increase and its greatest earnings since listing in 2019.

The Saudi oil company kept its dividend unchanged at $18.8 billion for the third quarter and said it is progressing on oil and gas expansion.

“While global market volatility and economic uncertainty remain, events during the first half of this year support our view that ongoing investment in our industry is essential,” said Aramco chief executive Amin Nasser in a statement.

The world’s biggest listed oil producers, including ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP, have all posted huge earnings after a surge in commodity prices fuelled by the Ukraine war and a rebound in post-pandemic demand. Most have boosted shareholder payouts.

The high profits are putting increasing political pressure on the oil majors, as high energy prices threaten to spark public blowback. President Joe Biden said in June that Exxon was making “more money than God”.

Brent crude, the international benchmark, has dropped from $120 in June to near $98 on Friday.

Saudi Aramco’s shares, which are listed in Riyadh, have risen more than 25 per cent this year.

US and other Western powers have been pushing to increase oil production to offset high prices at the pump but Opec has warned of the “severely limited availability of excess capacity” after years of under-investment and mismanagement.

Earlier this month, Opec and its allies agreed to one of the smallest oil production increases in the group’s history, with Saudi Arabia working to appease its western allies without using up its unused capacity.

Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest energy exporter, had said it would increase production only if there was demand.

FT : Germany must cut gas use by 20% to avoid winter rationing, regulator says

Germany must cut gas use by 20% to avoid winter rationing, regulator says
Warning of longer-term consequences for business in Europe’s largest economy

Germany must cut its gas use by a fifth to avoid a crippling gas shortage this winter, its top network regulator said, as businesses and households brace themselves for Europe’s biggest energy crisis in a generation.

Klaus Müller, head of the federal network agency (BNA), will be in charge of rationing gas supplies if Europe’s largest economy suffers a winter energy crunch. “If we fail to reach our target [of 20 per cent gas savings] then there is a serious risk that we will not have enough gas,” he told the Financial Times.

Müller said Germany would also need about 10 gigawatts of extra gas supply from other sources to make up for the missing volumes from Russia — largely liquefied natural gas from countries such as the US. That represents about 9 per cent of its current gas consumption.

He said Germany will also have to rely on imports of gas from other European countries.

Müller also warned that the longer-term cost of ending Germany’s dependence on Russia would be a “very high gas price” that could have big consequences for business.

“Some production could move away from Germany because gas has become too expensive,” he said. “And that’s a difficult thing to happen.”

Germany has feared a looming fuel crisis since Russia’s gas giant Gazprom throttled supplies through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline in mid-June, citing technical problems. The main conduit for delivery of Russian gas to Europe is operating at just 20 per cent capacity.

The decline in deliveries has pushed up gas prices, with the European benchmark rising from around €66 per megawatt hour at the start of the year to €206 (as of Friday afternoon). It has also played havoc with Germany’s attempts to fill its gas storage ahead of winter, when demand rises.

Germany has accused Russia of “weaponising” its energy exports, as part of a backlash against sanctions imposed over Russian president Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Over the weekend, Germany’s economy ministry ordered all companies and local authorities to reduce the minimum room temperature in their workspaces to 19 degrees C over the winter.

Berlin has already reached the second stage of a three-part national gas emergency plan. If it reaches the final stage, which would entail the rationing of gas to industrial customers, the BNA would have to decide which companies could no longer be fully supplied.

Müller admitted that being responsible for a decision that would affect thousands of businesses was taking its toll. “It’s like having the Alps on my shoulders,” he said. “But it’s all about making the best of a bad situation.”

He said the BNA was doing “a lot of detective work” to establish which companies should be prioritised in any rationing.

“You need to try to figure out what effect cutting off the gas to certain companies will have on the supply chain for critical products, what the consequences will be for jobs, for production, for value chains,” he said.

“If you take things like packaging and logistics, these are companies making containers for critical goods like medicine and food.” These, too, could be considered “systemically relevant”, he said.

The same also applied to the glass and ceramics industries, he said.

Key to Germany’s preparedness this winter is the amount of gas it is able to put into storage. Tank operators are required by law to bring levels up to 75 per cent by September 1, 85 per cent by October 1 and 95 per cent by November 1. Müller said the first target was achievable — levels are currently at 74.4 per cent — but the other two were “much more ambitious”.

Gazprom-owned Rehden, Germany’s largest gas storage facility, is still only 52.3 per cent full. With Rehden “we still have a long way to go to fill [it] up,” said Müller.

He warned that even if all tanks are filled they will only have enough gas for about two and a half months if Russia halts supplies altogether — and only provided it is not an unusually cold winter.

“We need enough for at least two winters, not just one,” he said. “And it’s not a good option to empty gas storage at the expense of next year.”

Germany wants to wean itself off Russian gas by the summer of 2024 and ministers have scoured the globe to secure shipments of liquefied natural gas (LNG). 

The country has chartered several specialised ships known as floating storage regasification units (FSRUs) that can turn LNG back into gas and feed it into the German pipeline network. Two will go into operation at the start of 2023. It is also building three permanent LNG terminals.

Yet experts warn that finding enough LNG will be a challenge. According to the International Energy Agency, LNG export capacity additions are set to slow in the next three years, a consequence of declining investment in the mid-2010s and construction delays.

Müller said the 2024 goal for ending all Russian energy imports depended on “a lot of unknowns” but was “feasible” provided Germany had six FSRUs operating, received additional gas from its neighbours and reduced industrial consumption.

If it comes to a gas emergency in the winter, Germany’s government has made clear that private households will be protected from a cut-off of supply. But Müller warned they still didn’t “have the right to consume huge amounts of gas”.

The authorities had, he acknowledged, no way of making residential consumers use less of the fuel. But “I think people will do what they did during the pandemic: they’ll stick to the rules, even when no one is actually enforcing them,” he said.

FT : Europe’s largest online fashion retailer bets sales slump is just a blip

Europe’s largest online fashion retailer bets sales slump is just a blip
Zalando chief Robert Gentz pledges to avoid mass job cuts despite first-ever fall in revenue

Europe’s largest online fashion retailer Zalando is betting the current slump in internet shopping is just a blip and it can avoid the kind of mass job cuts being undertaken by rivals, co-founder and co-chief executive Robert Gentz told the Financial Times.

Consumer-facing tech groups including Amazon, Klarna and Shopify have cut thousands of jobs this year as the online shopping bonanza that kicked off in first two years of the pandemic has ground to a halt.

Berlin-based Zalando has also been hit hard, with revenues declining in the first half of the year for the time in its 14-year history as it suffered €668mn in cash outflows and generated €7mn of operating losses.

However, the group is adamant it can avoid mass cuts. “Our plan is to keep employment by the end of this year steady,” said Gentz. Since the end of 2019, its workforce increased by a quarter to more than 17,000 employees.

“But we have become much more cautious in hiring,” said Gentz.

Gentz describes the market ructions as a temporary blip that will not have a lasting impact on the retailer.

Zalando listed in Frankfurt in 2014 but its share price has fallen 68 per cent over the past year to leave the group with a market capitalisation of less than €8bn. “Two years of enormous growth lie behind us. When I think about the fashion industry, my [optimism] has not changed at all,” said Gentz.

He said revenues were still 60 per cent higher than in 2019, the last year that was unaffected by the pandemic. He noted that just above 3 per cent of all of Europe’s clothes purchases are processed thought Zalando, which counts 10 per cent of Europe’s population as active customers.

Gentz is confident that Zalando’s market share can more than triple over the long term. “What has changed a bit is the trajectory of getting there.”

He acknowledged that Zalando initially struggled to grasp the magnitude of the crisis in consumer confidence triggered by the Ukraine war and surging inflation, but said the group has switched into damage-control mode. “We just need to play a bit more defensively,” he said — not an easy change for a company that has grown by about 25 per cent each year since 2014.

Zalando has been able to offset the carrier and packaging cost inflation that it has been facing so far, said Gentz, adding that the company was focusing on its profitability. It has scaled back marketing spending and postponed the building of new logistics centres. It also scaled back free shipping offers to limit lossmaking small orders.

He also argued that the 29 per cent slump in net cash this year, to €1.6bn, was driven by temporary factors such as a surge in inventory triggered by the sudden drop in demand.

That stands in contrast to late last year, when gummed-up global supply chains hampered the industry.

The drain from higher inventories will peter out in the second half of this year, said Gentz, while the postponed investments will also help to preserve cash. “Cash is not a concern for us.”

FT : Polio virus reappears in rich economies, exposing gaps in immunisation

Polio virus reappears in rich economies, exposing gaps in immunisation
New York City finds evidence of long-suppressed virus linked to recent samples in UK and Israel

Public health authorities in wealthy economies are racing to head off a return of polio, after the virus has turned up in several countries where it had been all but stamped out.

Health authorities in New York City on Friday said they detected polio in samples taken from the sewage system. Last month a man in suburban New York was diagnosed with the US’s first case since 2013.

In London, health officials this week said they would offer polio vaccine boosters to hundreds of thousands of children after the virus was detected in London waste water. Israel earlier identified its first cases since 1988 and there has been a cluster in war-torn Ukraine, where health services are under huge strain.

The situation is raising concerns that vaccine hesitancy and global conflicts could allow a disease that was on the brink of global eradication to make a comeback.

For much of the 20th century polio, which is short for poliomyelitis, was one of the most feared childhood diseases, killing and disabling tens of thousands of people every year. But vaccine development in the 1950s and a global campaign against the disease begun in 1988 slashed the number of infections to just 175 cases by 2019 and reduced the number of countries where it is endemic to two — Pakistan and Afghanistan.

But its re-emergence in Europe and the US, along with the disruption of inoculation programmes — by the Covid-19 pandemic, and by war in places such as Ukraine and Afghanistan — have caused public health officials to raise the alarm.

“There has been a huge dip globally in the routine immunisation coverage, as countries were engaged in the Covid-19 pandemic response. If you scratch the surface, this shows the vulnerability of countries’ immunisation systems,” said Siddhartha Datta, the World Health Organization’s regional adviser for vaccine-preventable diseases in the European region.

Last month the WHO and Unicef released data showing the largest sustained decline in childhood vaccinations in three decades, with at least 25mn infants missing out on life-saving jabs in 2021. Slightly less than 7mn children missed their third dose of polio vaccine last year when compared to 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic.

New York health officials warned on Friday that hundreds of people may have already contracted the virus following a diagnosis of polio on July 21 in an unvaccinated man who developed paralysis in Rockland county, about 30 miles north-west of New York City.

The suburban county has one of the lowest immunisation rates in the US. Authorities have set up vaccination hubs, distributed leaflets urging people to get jabs and are considering offering polio booster shots to top up people’s immunity.

Dr Mary Leahy, chief executive of Bon Secours Charity Health System, one of the largest hospital groups in Rockland, said the virus had probably infected a lot of people without their knowledge because three-quarters of those with infections do not show any symptoms.

“They have polio, but they’re walking around and do not know that they have it. Only about 25 per cent develop flu-like symptoms . . . less than 1 per cent go on to develop paralysis.”


Genetic studies of the New York case have linked it to the polio viruses in Israel and London, suggesting ties across borders. The detected viruses are examples of vaccine-derived polio, which is a strain related to the weakened live poliovirus contained in the oral polio vaccine. They can cause illness and paralysis if they are allowed to circulate in populations with unvaccinated people for long enough and then mutate.

Rockland county has a vaccination rate of 60 per cent for children at two years of age, well below the statewide average of 78 per cent. The WHO says 95 per cent vaccination coverage is required to provide herd immunity.

Rockland is home to a large and growing Orthodox Jewish population. Dorrit Reiss, professor of law at the University of California, Hastings College of Law, said the Orthodox community in the Rockland area had been actively sought out by national anti-vaccine campaigners, who have held rallies and distributed leaflets raising fears about immunisation.

“There is nothing in Judaism that is against vaccines, but some specific Jewish Orthodox communities have concerns. They live a closed life in multigenerational homes with large numbers of kids, so in a very real sense it is an area that is vulnerable to an outbreak,” she said.

Local tensions over vaccination remain high after a measles outbreak in 2018 and 2019 which infected hundreds of people, centred in Rockland’s ultra-Orthodox community.

New York Jewish Week and other local publications have reported the man who contracted polio in Rockland is Orthodox, although local health officials have not confirmed this due to concerns about stigmatising the community.

A New York state senator last month also identified the infected polio patient as an Orthodox Jew and alleged that some private Jewish schools had a history of non-compliance with vaccination requirements. He later retracted his statement following objections from Jewish groups.

“One thing about this polio case is it’s in Rockland country, which had a massive measles outbreak two years ago — so that suggests there is vaccine hesitancy,” said Dr Marny Eulberg, a retired physician and polio survivor who has studied the disease for decades.

“That’s a problem because these days many young parents haven’t seen polio, it isn’t part of their consciousness. And the reality is once you get polio, the treatment now is no better than it was in the 1950s: so the best response is to get vaccinated.”

Health providers in Rockland say fears about polio are prompting some previously hesitant people to come forward to get vaccinated.

“We have seen one mother who was anti-vax and has not given other vaccinations, that brought her two children in for the polio vaccine, because the paralysis scares her,” said Amanda Salzman, director of communications at Refuah Health in Rockland.

Salzman said the clinic had administered almost 500 polio vaccines so far, out of a total of 2,000 across the county.

Health experts say the latest cases demonstrate the need for vigilance on vaccination efforts and for governments to support global eradication efforts on polio. This programme is seeking $4.6bn in funds to complete vaccination efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“There is a huge need to identify funding,” said Dr Jay Wenger, who leads a polio eradication programme at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “The importance of getting that is then we won’t have these episodes of viruses in New York, in London or anywhere.”

FT : Volatility investor warns of false dawn for US equities market

Volatility investor warns of false dawn for US equities market
Capstone’s Paul Britton says ‘nervous investors will start selling’ when companies struggle to refinance debts

Investors heartened by this summer’s recovery in US equity markets should not relax their guard so soon because corporate debt concerns will probably spark another downturn at the end of this year, one of the world’s pre-eminent volatility specialists has predicted.

While sharply falling equity prices in the first half of the year reflected concerns about future earnings due to inflation, investors have not yet reckoned with the effects of higher interest rates on overly indebted companies, Paul Britton, founder of Capstone Investment Advisors, told the Financial Times.

He warned that news of particular companies struggling to refinance their debt at affordable rates would spook the markets again, probably in the fourth quarter or in early 2023.

“We are getting close to the end of phase 1, a repricing of growth. Phase 2 is more interesting to me. It is more of a credit cycle,” Britton said. “People are upset that they’ve lost money, but there is no fear.”

“The headlines in Q4 and Q1 are going to be of people having trouble refinancing, and nervous investors will start selling,” he said. “By Q4 or Q1 it will switch to fear.”

While many companies took advantage of extremely low interest rates in 2020 and 2021 to refinance their debt for very long periods of time, signs of strain are starting to appear in debt markets.

Bankers last month postponed a debt financing for the $16.5bn takeover of software company Citrix by Vista Equity Partners and Elliott Management, after struggling to find willing lenders. When companies have pushed ahead, they have often had to accept more onerous terms than in the previous 18 months. Banks including Bank of America and Goldman Sachs that initially committed to fund such deals have been left nursing losses.

Capstone, which had $9.1bn in assets under management as of July 1, profits from choppy markets. It not only runs one of the world’s largest hedge funds specialising in volatility but also helps institutional and wealthy customers protect their portfolios from extreme risk.

The investment group’s global fund was up 0.8 per cent for the first half and its dispersion fund was 14 per cent higher, according to a person who has seen the results.

Global financial markets swung wildly in first half as the S&P 500 index entered a bear market amid concerns about a looming recession and tighter monetary policy from the Federal Reserve.

But as the equity market has more recently found its footing, gauges of volatility such as the Cboe’s Vix index have calmed; earlier this week the Vix closed below its long-running average of 20 for the first time since April.

A fierce debate has split the market over whether the rebound in US stocks can persist, particularly if the Fed raises interest rates more aggressively or more quickly than investors are wagering.

Britton, a former floor trader who profited from the late 1990s volatility of the Asian and Russian crises but took losses in the 2008 financial crisis, said he did not expect the number of corporate bankruptcies to be higher than in past downturns. Problems are likely to be concentrated among companies rated below investment grade, he added.

“Leveraged loans are the top of my list, and high-yield debt from anyone that doesn’t have cash flow,” he said.

Refinancing woes will have an outsized effect on market sentiment, he said, because investors have become too complacent that central bankers will ride to their rescue with lower rates. This time, he predicted, Fed governors will stick to their inflation-busting mantra and maintain higher rates.

“They don’t want to recreate what they have done today. Any intervention they make to stabilise markets is going to be significantly smaller [than previous efforts] and the market is going to be severely disappointed,” Britton said. “The Fed and other central bankers are going to be incredibly gun-shy.”

Indeed, Mary Daly, president of the San Francisco branch of the Fed, warned this week that it is far too early to “declare victory” in the central bank’s fight against elevated inflation.

Britton said he doubts the Fed can avoid a recession, and that could push the US unemployment rate to 4.5 per cent from its current 3.5 per cent level.

“Ultimately the Fed has got an extraordinarily difficult job. It [the economy] is a very large plane they are trying to land on a very short and very narrow runway. They could stick the landing. I just think it will be hard.”

WWD : Prada Group Seen Nearing Dual Listing

Prada Group Seen Nearing Dual Listing
Co-CEO Patrizio Bertelli had hinted at the possibility to explore a second listing last year, but reports now suggest the company is getting into action.

MILAN — Prada’s already shared plans to explore a second listing in Europe are reportedly getting into action.

The luxury brand’s co-chief executive officer Patrizio Bertelli had hinted at the potential move during Prada’s Capital Market Day last year, as reported by WWD.

“We are satisfied with Hong Kong, it was the right choice,” Bertelli said at the time, admitting, however, that “we could explore a listing in Europe. That said, we don’t feel the need to now, we are OK this way.”

According to a Bloomberg report published Friday, the company, which has been publicly listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange since 2011, is moving swiftly to turn those vague plans into action and seeking $1 billion from a second listing in Milan, likely taking place in 2023.

Contacted Friday by WWD, Prada had no comment.

>>> Barron’s Weekend Summary

Barron’s Weekend Summary: Despite the enormity of the ‘green’ transition, investors will need to be picky.


Cover Story:
-Despite the enormity of the ‘green’ transition, investors will need to be picky. Big, obvious winners are few and far between. Green-energy indexes and funds like the Invesco Solar exchange-traded fund (ticker: TAN) have historically traded based on short-term expectations for government policy or raw materials costs, instead of the longer-term opportunity. And some of the companies involved haven’t shown they can persevere through good times and bad.

Interview:
-This week Barron’s interviewed Virginie Maisonneuve. Ms. Maisonneuve’s fascination with China began when she was 5 years old and living in Paris. She loved listening to stories from a book of tales from China and poring over the delicate drawings that adorned its pages. She went on to earn a degree in Mandarin Chinese and become an investor, working and living all over the world. “I always knew that I would get involved with China,” says Maisonneuve, managing director and global chief investment officer for equity at Allianz Global Investors. She began her career in China as a consultant for the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing. Since then, she has held portfolio management and chief investment officer positions at companies such as Pimco, Schroders, and State Street Research, and has pioneered investing in areas from China to environmental, social, and governance, or ESG.

Tech Trader:
-Demand for consumer-focused tech products is sagging, with sales weakening for PCs and peripherals, Android smartphones, and videogames. And there are now signs that slowdown is spreading into other places, including the automotive, industrial, and data center markets, where demand was supposed to be more durable. Over the past week, two key chip companies provided grim updates. On Monday, the graphics chip company Nvidia warned that results for its fiscal second quarter ended July 31 would be dramatically below previous expectations, due to an unexpected decline in demand for graphics chips targeted at videogames but also used for cryptocurrency mining.

The Trader:
-Coinbase trades like a side bet on Bitcoin. Lately, though, shares of the crypto brokerage have added meme-stock volatility to the mix, taking cues from the likes of GameStop and AMC Entertainment. Consider the frenetic trading surrounding Coinbase’s earnings report on Aug. 9. Leading up to the report, the stock nearly doubled from lows around $50 in July, reaching $98 this past week. Along the way, the stock plunged 21% on July 26, only to roar back more than 80% in the ensuing days. After a retreat, the stock closed up 7.7%, at $90.49, on Friday.
The volatility arises from several factors. For one, hordes of investors are betting against it. About 18% of Coinbase stock is sold short. Such high short interest makes a stock vulnerable to a “squeeze,” when traders who had sold borrowed shares—aiming to buy them back later at a lower price—must frantically cover their positions, causing a stock to surge.
-Inflation slowed in July, according to Department of Labor data. The consumer price index rose 8.5% in July from a year ago. That was lower than both the 8.7% increase in prices forecast by economists and the 9.1% reading in June. That news sent the S&P 500 index up 2.1% that day and tipped the tech-weighted NASDAQ Composite into a bull market. The S&P closed the week up 3.3%, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the NASDAQ gained 2.9% and 3.1%, respectively.

Features:
-The House of Representatives on Friday passed a broad climate, tax and healthcare bill containing significant measures to lower prescription drug prices within the Medicare program, allowing the government to negotiate drug prices for the first time and capping seniors’ out-of-pocket drug costs at $2,000 annually. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, passed in a 220-207 vote along party lines, will now move to President Biden for signing into law. Among other provisions, the bill will allow the government to negotiate prices on select medications, cap seniors’ out-of-pocket spending on drugs at $2,000 a year, penalize drug makers that increase their prices by more than the inflation rate within the Medicare program, and cap the out-of-pocket cost of insulin at $35 a month for Medicare beneficiaries.
-Consumer sentiment rebounded in August as inflation showed signs of cooling off, according to preliminary figures from the University of Michigan. The university’s consumer sentiment index rose to 55.1 in August, early figures showed. This is a 7% monthly increase from last month’s 51.5 reading, and above consensus estimates for 52.3. The figure fell by 21% from a year earlier, when the index was at 70.3.

European Trader:
-The Dow Jones US Retail Index is down 19% this year, and it’s a similar story in Europe. The Stoxx Europe Total Market Retail index is down 28.7%. But JD Sports Fashion has a record of thriving in downturns. The British sportswear retailer—which sells footwear and apparel from brands including Nike, New Balance, The North Face, and Under Armour—could buck the latest trend, with the stock estimated to more than double in price. Shares have tumbled 25.6% to GBP 1.34 ($1.61) in the past six months, but Investec analysts see a 123% rise to £3.

Emerging Markets:
-Poland has proved a critical front-line ally in the West’s struggle to bolster Ukraine against Russian aggression.
The nation of 38M has absorbed at least one million refugees from its southeastern neighbor, while providing logistics for an enormous transfer of NATO armaments.

Poland is also at the sharp end of the West’s economic problems. Inflation is galloping at 16% annually, nearly twice the euro-zone rate. The central bank has hiked interest rates from 0.1% to 6.5% over the past 10 months. That spells calamity in a country where some 90% of mortgage borrowers took out variable-rate loans.

Commodities:
-Orange juice prices could get fizzed up over the next few weeks. The market is already suffering from ultra-low inventory levels, which means the risks of bad weather could potentially drive prices up more than 20% to record levels, say experts. “If you were to get a hurricane in Florida’s citrus belt that delivers a powerful punch, it’s likely we would have quite a panic in the marketplace,” says Shawn Hackett, president of Hackett Financial Advisors. “It’s possible we could test all-time highs.” Other experts also see Brazil, the world’s largest orange juice producer, facing weather problems this year, which could have similar impacts on the market.

Streetwise:
-Jack Hough figured that the tax breaks for nuclear power in the new Inflation Reduction Act are for existing plants only, which is just as well. Apart from a quick skim of the Department of Energy’s Nuclear 101 webpage, I don’t know much about fission—or science of any kind, really. Also, my wife uses that hose for her tomatoes. But if clean-energy tax breaks are usually for stuff the government wants companies or individuals to build or buy, why would this one incentivize something that’s already up and running? That, I might be able to answer.