Bloomberg - Evening Briefing - Gas rationing

Europe may need to ration natural gas to meet winter heating demand if the Nord Stream pipeline doesn’t restart after planned maintenance. “It looks pretty dire for this winter now,” said Brian Gilvary of the UK chemicals company Ineos. “If Nord Stream 1 doesn’t come back, it is inevitable.” Europe may be engulfed in an energy crisis, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at one Swedish nuclear plant. Nordic power prices have been so low in recent days that a nuclear station has curbed output voluntarily. —David E. Rovella

Bloomberg is tracking the coronavirus pandemic and the progress of global vaccination efforts.

The European Union is falling behind on its high-profile promises to deliver a substantial aid package to Ukraine at the same time the bloc is confronting the prospect of severe economic pain at home. It was almost two months ago when European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed sending 9 billion euros ($9 billion) in emergency loans to Ukraine. So far, the bloc has only managed to agree on an initial tranche that covers one ninth of that.

Ursula von der Leyen  Photographer: Milan Jaros/Bloomberg

Wheat futures wiped out their gains for the year in Chicago, as prospects for weaker demand offset supply worries that were exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. With wheat harvests rolling in across the US and much of Europe, boosting near-term supplies, its price decline could help tame the run-up in food inflation.

Wall Street and European investment banks have an acute sense of buyer’s remorse. After firms bulked up with expensive hires during the frenetic early pandemic period when mergers and stock offerings took off, equity capital markets desks are bracing for a wave of firings amid a collapse in deal flow. M&A and leveraged finance jobs are also at risk.

Prospects receded for a full percentage-point rate hike by the Federal Reserve this month as two officials declined to endorse it and a key measure of inflation expectations cooled. On Friday, Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic voiced wariness of a super-sized increase and St. Louis’s James Bullard said he would defer judgment to the central bank’s policy meeting later this month. Bullard did favor getting rates higher than previously thought, saying the benchmark rate should reach a range of 3.75% to 4% by the end of the year, rather than 3.5%. That implies about 2.25 percentage points of tightening from current levels.

James Bullard  Photographer: Luke MacGregor/Bloomberg

Covid-19 infections in the UK have jumped by almost 800,000 in a week, with some parts of the country nearing the record levels seen during the spring. The UK will offer Covid-19 boosters to a wider number of people in the fall as a new wave increases pressure on the health system. And in China, authorities reported its highest daily case tally in seven weeks as a new cluster emerged in the southern province of Guangxi.

Senator Joe Manchin has done it again. The West Virginia Democrat, with the help of 50 Republican senators he regularly sides with against his own party, has crushed the life out of much of President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda. A good friend of coal—both politically with millions of dollars flowing to him from Big Oil and personally given his own fossil fuel fortune—Manchin blew up the most recent scaled down version of a plan to help fight global warming. “The stakes are so high,” one environmental expert told the New York Times. “It’s just infuriating that he is condemning our own children.” 

Biden met Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman for the first time in Jeddah on Friday, effectively putting an end to his efforts to shun the Saudi leader for the brutal 2018 murder and dismemberment of Washington Post columnist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi. The White House says it expects some results when it comes to oil.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, right, and US President Joe Biden, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on July 15. Source: Saudi Press Agency

• US Secret Service accused of destroying critical insurrection evidence.
• Saudi Arabia’s $500 billion desert dream city just keeps getting weirder.
• Texas’s power plants run nonstop as state suffers under huge heat wave.
• Fintech executives convicted in US after $160 million sent to Nigeria.
• Bloomberg Opinion: The DOJ should seek Trump’s indictment.
• Bitcoin miner woes risk getting worse after Celsius collapse.
• Juul seeks new financing to boost flexibility as it faces legal fights.

China, Mark Gongloff writes in Bloomberg Opinion, is kind of falling apart. People who took out large mortgages to buy properties being built by since-imploded developers like Evergrande have ended up with only unfinished properties and, well, those mortgages. Many of those borrowers are now refusing to pay. And this revolt is only  the tip of an iceberg made of troubled debt. 

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