Brussels’ plan to ease the energy crisis

Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Monday, April 20th, and this is your FT News briefing. Donald Trump wants to restart talks with Iran. And Brussels is using the energy crunch to push renewables. Plus, we look at a controversial new craze on Wall Street. It's tax loss harvesting. But this time it's turbocharged. I'm Sonia. Hudson and here's the news you need to start your day.

US President Donald Trump says he's sending senior officials to Pakistan to negotiate with Iran again. He told Fox News his son-in-law Jared Kushner and Special Envoy Steve Whitkop would arrive in Islamabad today. The previous round of talks were led by Vice President JD Vance, but Iranian state affiliated media said Tehran won't send anyone to the talks, not until the U.S. lifts its naval blockade of Iranian ports.

The two sides still have many sticking points, including Tehran's stockpiles of highly enriched uranium and how the Strait of Hormuz will be governed.

The European Commission is pushing remote work and public transportation subsidies to cut fossil fuel use. Brussels is trying to make the energy price shock from the US-Iran war a little less painful. The recommendations also include measures to help move toward clean power. The Commission is going to present member states with its plan later this week. And here to tell us more is the FT's Ian Johnston, who broke this story. Hey Ian. Hi there.

So what are the highlights of these set of recommendations? So some of the highlights are behavioural recommendations to try and convince EU citizens and businesses to use less energy. That includes remote working, so encouraging businesses where they can to have at least one day of remote working per week. Uh measures to support the use of heat pumps, electric vehicles.

and also uh encouraging Member States to use subsidy schemes for things like public transport. But they are also going to bring in laws to encourage more electrification. So they're going to tweak electricity market rules in the EU to lower the price of the transportation of electricity. That's related to grid charges. And they're also going to try and make sure the electricity is taxed lower than fossil fuels.

Uh they tried this in twenty twenty five and have been doing so for some years and the talks broke down. But there's hope that this more targeted measure will get member state approval because of the energy crisis. Yeah, that added pressure of the energy shock, I'm sure, has some people feeling optimistic. But has Brussels ever done anything like this before, you know, after other energy shocks?

So the measures are inspired by what Brussels and Europe did during the previous energy price shock after Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine. That also sent energy prices through the roof in Europe and so they ruled out recommendations, for example, to turn down thermostats by one degree Celsius. And so those small behavioral changes can actually have quite a significant impact on overall energy use. And we saw a lot of demand reduction in twenty twenty two.

We see here that Brussels is turning to the same playbook. Mm. Yeah, that's interesting. I was curious about whether people would actually heed these recommendations or just be Brussels kind of shouting into the void. Um, do you anticipate any pushback against these recommendations that we're gonna see this week? Brussels is very keen and officials uh I've spoken to are very keen to stress that these are recommendations. They're by no means binding.

But there's always a question mark over whether the EU is trying to encourage people to do things that they'd rather not do. I think they're leaving it in the hands of Member States to decide whether or not they want to use these measures. And so we will see if Member States decide to take them up on those recommendations.

I'm also curious about some of the measures to help the block transition away from fossil fuels. Do you think those measures to move to cleaner fuel will have staying power if you know this is just a temporary shock and those are measures that take a long time to implement. I think they could lead to uh changes in how Europe gets its energy. As we saw in twenty twenty two that not only did Europe move away from Russian gas, it did significantly build out renewable

energy infrastructure. It is still getting a lot of gas from uh the US and was getting some from the Middle East as well. If you look at energy prices in the likes of Spain, where they've got loads of solar and wind power. in France where they've got lots of nuclear power. They are better prepared for this crisis than some of the other countries in the bloc that are still using lots of gas, for example, Italy. So

Whether these demand reduction measures work is probably an open question and it could be a temporary demand reduction. But I think on the long term there is going to be more momentum for those cleaner energy forms. Ian Johnston is an EU correspondent for the FT. Thanks, Ian. Thank you.

FTSE 100 bosses are making a lot more than they were just a few years ago. That's according to a Deloitte analysis. It looked at 55 of the biggest UK listed companies that have already disclosed their annual report. Deloitte found the average pay for chief executives went from about three and a half million pounds in 2021 to almost six million today.

That increase comes during a global war for talent. US executives have gotten huge pay packages, and the UK is still a long way off from matching that. Take, for example, Tesla's CEO Elon Musk, he could earn as much as a trillion dollars if he hits certain targets. And the CEO of Google's owner Alphabet could get almost 700 million in the next three years.

There's a new craze on Wall Street. Hedge funds are growing their assets fast by slashing wealthy investors' tax bills. It's called tax loss harvesting, and it's brought in$90 billion in assets since the start of last year. But the practice has its fair share of controversy. Here to explain all this is the FT's US investment correspondent, Amelia Pollard. Hi, Amelia. Hi Sonia. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for being on the show. So, explain tax loss harvesting to me. What exactly are these hedge funds doing? Sure. So tax loss harvesting as a practice has actually been around for decades, by some measures, maybe even a century.

And it basically involves selling securities at a loss, so the ones that have lost money to offset gains elsewhere in your portfolio. So It basically is a way to ensure that if you've had some losing investments at the end of the year, you can write that off on your tax bill and pay a little less in taxes.

What these hedge funds are doing is they're using leverage and short selling, which are new dimensions to this practice of tax loss harvesting, to basically turbocharge the strategy. And they're able to generate way more consistent tax losses. And at a bigger scale with leverage. Okay, so uh on top of this being a somewhat complex strategy, it has been very lucrative. Why is that the case?

Yeah. So there are two hedgephones in particular that have really led the charge on this. One is called AQR, which by some measures is the biggest hedgephone in the world. And the other one is called Quantino. It's really taken off in the last couple of years. Seemingly from what I've found in my reporting from word of mouth. And so because these strategies and funds are really targeted towards ultra high net worth and high net worth investors.

These are social groups where people kind of exchange investment ideas and products that they're investing in. And I think that it's also worked. You know, there've been really kind of consistent and strong returns the last few years and so it's attracted a lot of capital. Why is this taking off now in particular? Is there something that's going on in the wider market that's making this more attractive, or it's just kind of a new strategy and people are catching on to it?

I mean, one thing that's happened in the US over the last decade is that the really crazy bull market with stocks has just generated this. whole new class of multimillionaires that didn't exist before. And a lot of these people might have a lot of their wealth tied out into one stock if they worked for a company where they were paid in equity. And so they're basically looking to diversify those holdings. So that's one big contributor.

I think there's a constant obsession among wealthy Americans of trying to lower their tax bills any way they can and these funds are really tapping into that desire. But I imagine the strategy is also a bit controversial. It is. There's a few reasons. One is that there are some people on Wall Street who believe that this could come under regulatory scrutiny and I should say everything these funds are doing, to my knowledge, is

Totally legal. And so it's not a concern necessarily under this administration, but there's some sense that if Democrats come back to the White House, this could be a potential target. There's kind of like a more fundamental criticism too, which is that, you know, this is just a really effective way of lowering really rich Americans' tax bills.

You know, and so some people are critical of ways that rich investors and Americans are able to find ways to lower the tax bills. And this is obviously one of the biggest tools they've been turning to recently. What about risks just as a wealth management investment strategy? Yeah, so it's important to remember that hedge funds for a long time were not ever targeted towards

Richer regular investors. Hedge funds were always investment tools or vehicles used by endowments and pension funds, basically institutional investors who didn't need to worry about taxes because they weren't taxed. Pension funds and endowments. also don't need to worry as much about liquidity. So they go an eyes wide open to what these investment strategies are, which is that they know that they use leverage, they know the risk involved.

Some of the wealth advisors I spoke to raised the concern that some rich Americans are not totally cognizant of what they're investing in. And even though, you know, there are plenty of disclosures about this not being guaranteed returns, you know, there always being a a risk of loss. that they might not fully appreciate, you know, what leverage and short selling could mean for their investments or capital. Amelia Pollard is the FT's US investment correspondent. Thanks Amelia.

Thanks so much for having me. You can read more on all these stories for free when you click the links in our show notes. This has been your daily FT News briefing. Check back tomorrow for the latest business news. Vi på Danska bank vet att företagets hållbarhetsarbete kan innebära ut. För företag i Sverige och i Norden med de ekonomiska. Danske Bank. Frissör, massör eller larmoperatör. Servitör, ingenjör eller webbredaktör. Kontakta oss på ikea.se-företag.