The European Commission searches for a gas-price villain
And settles on a once obscure market
The main target of Ursula von der Leyen’s state-of-the-union address on September 14th was energy companies. It is wrong, the president of the European Commission said, for them to make such profits “from war and on the back of consumers”. Windfall taxes raising €140bn ($140bn) would follow, she announced. Yet the speech also included a telling sideswipe at a once obscure part of commodity markets: the Dutch Transfer Title Facility (ttf), a gas-trading network.
This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “The LIBOR of energy?”
Finance & economics September 17th 2022
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