Welcome to the Euro Intelligence Podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Zuzana Munchank and Jack Smith.

Today we want to talk about, well again, talk about gas as we did last week, but this time we want to talk about, or answer a question, is why is the gas price falling?

Jack, why is the gas price falling? Oh man man. I was about to say, you'd have to,

you'd have to ask the gas price that, but no, I think there are a few reasons that we can point to.

There are maybe some what you would call, I guess, fundamental reasons related to the actual

physical supply and demand dynamics. And what I think... maybe some what you would call, I guess, fundamental reasons related to the actual physical

supply and demand dynamics and what I think is a major psychological reason. So physically speaking,

the EU has done very well in terms of making its storage targets. And now we're in a kind of

position where we're overshooting

them. That means that, you know, the market is, I guess, anticipating that major source of

demand, which has been kind of state-mandated and state-backed storage filling starting to kind of

tail off. You have some demand reduction, especially kind of industrial demand reduction. Obviously,

some of that too is what you would call demand destruction. You talked about, for instance,

Hanke, like the toilet paper manufacturer going bust. And you'll have things like that where

industrial consumers are, you know, steel, steel, obviously. Fertilizer was a major one too for a bit,

where firms are kind of substituting for other sources like, say, heating oil or whatever,

or they're kind of ramping down production. That's one other reason. One which I also think is

important is the kind of psychological factor, right,

which is that I think especially kind of in March and at the beginning of the summer when we

saw those two kind of really sharp movements in the benchmark price in response to things that

Russia was doing, there was a lot of fear of what Russia was going to do

next, what they were going to limit next, especially as it became clearer that Russian gas or

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