Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Zasanne Muncheng and Jack Smith.

Today, we would like to talk about the complex of energy prices, inflation, the geopolitical risks, even stability pact reform and how they all together produce an economic environment in Europe that might be

very critical in the years ahead. Jack, you wrote about gas prices today. So what should we expect?

Will they eventually plateau out or are they set to rise further? I'm not sure if I would necessarily

say that they would rise further. Of course,

I guess, you know, predicting commodity prices is a bit of a mug's game, but I think certainly

we can expect the prices to be quite high for a while. This was the message that came through

this week from the CEO of Equinor, so, you know, formerly kind of stat oil. It's worth taking

seriously because Equinor is one of the largest suppliers of gas to the rest of Europe from Norway.

It's also kind of very clear as well when you look at some of the other market indicators. So

contracts for Dutch gas, which is a key European benchmark, are going to be quite high into, you know,

at least next year. So I think we can expect the prices to stay elevated compared to where they

were last year for quite a while. And of course, because of the relationship between gas prices

and broader electricity and energy prices, that means we should kind of

maybe also expect energy prices to stay quite high.

So, you know, the jump that we saw, you know, in January, kind of year on year was very high,

almost kind of 30% in some other countries.

So, you know, in Italy it was even higher.

It was close to 40%.

Again, because of their kind of

dependence on gas. Italy is an especially gas dependent country. So, yeah, I would say the kind of

outlook is, at least in the kind of near term, not amazing. I think also something that's worth

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