Odd Lots

Transcript: Isabella Weber On Germany's Plan to Cap the Price of Gas

Communal lights on within a block of apartments on a housing estate in the Steilshoop district in Hamburg, Germany.

Photographer: Imke Lass/Bloomberg
Lock
This article is for subscribers only.

The surge in gas costs in Europe threatens to impose massive pain on households and cripple energy-intensive heavy industry. So there has been a lot of urgency on the part of governments to figure out a way to ease the pain. Of course, when the problem is a scarcity of energy itself, you can't just throw money at the problem. You can't print more gas molecules. On this episode, we speak with Isabella Weber, economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who has been serving on an independent government commission in Germany to formulate a plan to ease the burden. We discuss her work and how price controls in energy play out in practice. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.