Finance comes into play

Increase everything. Almost. Sometimes for justified reasons. Others less. And in the supermarkets the assaults begin as during the Covid. In Naples and Abruzzo in many shops pasta, farina e oil they disappeared from the shelves. But not all increases are created equal. Let’s take the gas. He lives a paradox. L’electricity even worse. Gas continues to arrive in Italy. Russia has not turned off the taps, it has widened them. But why then an asset of which there is still an abundance, which costs less than 5 dollars to extract it, whose selling price a year ago did not exceed 20 dollars, is now traded at over 200? Gas, like other goods, is now a financial product. Its price is made on the stock exchange, where supply, demand, forecasts, fear and even speculation coexist. And as in any market there are those who win and gain, and those who lose and pay. Then there is the electricity bill. Gas speculation also weighs on light. For a mechanism that can now be considered “diabolical”, that of the marginal price. He also talked about it Mario Draghi after the European Council of Versailles assuming a change of regime. The price of electricity makes it the source that costs the most. Today, in fact, gas. It means that if a wind, solar, or even coal plant produces at a cost of 10 but the gas plant produces at 100, the recognized price is also 100 for all the other plants. And consumers pay. The electricity companies are the winners. It is no coincidence that the European Union has prepared a draft reform for a series of common actions to contain the cost of electricity which, among its pillars, has the revision of the marginal price mechanism and a taxation until June of this year, of the extra profits of the energy companies on which the government is already working. In the case of energy, in short, the market is failing its task. On the horizon are the ceilings and administered prices. Something similar is also happening for the price of gas he was born in diesel to the pump which, by now, has well exceeded 2 euros. The National Consumers Union has presented a complaint to the Antitrust and a complaint to the prosecutor. «How is it possible», says Mauro Antonelli of the UNC, «that the increase of prices arrived so quickly from the wells to the pump? ‘ Lawful question. The gasoline in the tanks was bought at lower prices, just as the refiners bought it at lower prices. Issues on which the Guardia di Finanza would have turned on a beacon. Consumers asked for its intervention, also relying on the nucleus that collaborates with Guarantor of Competition. The prices of the individual petrol pumps must be communicated to the Mise Observatory. Verifications could start from these data. Not surprisingly, the minister of ecological transition Roberto Cingolani spoke of a “colossal scam at the expense of citizens and businesses“. Rarely had a minister been seen blowing like this on the flames of a fire that is already raging with the protests of the transporters. A sign that, even in this case, the government is ready to intervene.

THE DISTINCTION

Also because sooner or later a distinction will have to be made between sectors in which speculation gallops and others that instead experience real supply problems. Let’s take the durum wheat. Its price has already started to soar since last year due to the collapse of crops in Canada (minus 60%), the main world exporter and the decline in other important producing countries. In short, in this case, war has almost nothing to do with it, since we only import soft wheat from Ukraine. Or sunflower oil, with Ukraine which, together with Russia, supplies (or rather supplied) 63% of Italy’s needs. Here speculation has little to do with it. Matter is missing. As well as the birches from which the paperoi ferrous scrap for the steel industry. In these cases, war stops industries and makes people poor. In others, as mentioned, there are also those who make money.