The City View: Michael Hewson on Germany’s Russian energy oversights and Merkel’s legacy
Today Andy Silvester talks to Michael Hewson, Chief Markets Analyst at CMC Markets. They go through the latest IMF forecasts, which included downgrades and the worst growth forecast in the G7 for the UK; Germany’s exposure to energy price fluctuations, the mounting pressure to reduce its dependency on Russian oil and gas, and Angela Merkel’s legacy; and lower March consumer spending in the UK.
Andy also talks to City A.M.’s Energy Correspondent, Nicholas Earl. They discuss dire warnings from energy bosses in Parliament today, who warned of a severe impact in customer bills; and news of the collapsed energy firm Bulb’s CEO earning a £250,000 taxpayer-funded salary.
Episode transcript (auto-generated)
Andy Silvester 0:08 Good afternoon and welcome to the City View Podcast. I’m Andy Sylvester editor here at City and fresh from an Easter break spent predominantly at The Oval. I do hope you all had an equally enjoyable few days off, but it’s the grindstone we are though in a few minutes, I’ll be joined by Michael Hewson, Chief market analyst at CMC markets. We’ll look through the latest IMF forecasts none of which paint in particularly jolly picture for the future of the UK economy, at least in the near and medium term. But for now, I’m joined by Nicholas Earle our NG correspondent bits and pieces in the corporate news happening today, Nick, but nothing bigger than energy, feel like suddenly we start record even after Easter energy bosses up in Parliament today, one of whom was was bulbs, Hayden Wood, who will come back to in a minute, but for those companies that are still in business on their own two feet, rather than taxpayers, some pretty dire warnings of what’s to come.
Nicholas Earl 1:03 Yeah, that’s right — Eon’s chief executive, Michael Lewis is well there’s gonna be a severe impact this October, and he’s actually estimating a 50% increase in overall debt on his books from customer bills, which is a seismic rise, of course. And you also had similar gloomy tidings from Centrica who said a 10% of their customers are already late in their payments. And to capital we had EDF spouse who said that he estimates one pound and 12 being spent on energy bills by policy users will go to one pound in six October.