Global Voice

It’s been a wild year for commodity markets, marked by despair last spring as the world ground to a halt and followed more recently by exuberance. Nowhere has the bullish feeling been more evident than the usually staid market for liquefied natural gas: February futures for Asian gas hit nearly $20 per million British thermal units last week according to data from Refinitiv. As recently as mid-December, they were only trading around $8 per MMBtu.

Unfortunately for gas producers, today’s prices aren’t sustainable and the longer-term supply picture is bearish. Supply stoppages combined with the coldest winter in Asia in decades are a perfect market for those gas producers who still have capacity to supply spot shipments—including U.S. firms like Cheniere. But futures are already pricing in warmer weather a few months out: the April contract is currently trading around $7 per MMBtu.

Further out, Chinese demand is still the swing factor—as it is for most industrial commodities. Here the news is bullish, but perhaps less so than some LNG vendors might hope. Chinese demand continues to expand robustly, and China continues to consume far more gas than it produces. The bad news is that the growth of

American consumers have been forced to eat food-delivery costs sometimes nearly as big as the meals themselves. Regulators are fed up.

In addition to new laws boosting compensation and benefits for delivery drivers, restaurant protections such as pandemic-related commission caps have been proliferating at the city and state levels. Consumer protections could be next.

New laws have been costly for delivery players that have been struggling to generate consistent profits lately. On its third-quarter conference call, Uber , which owns and operates Uber Eats, suggested it wouldn’t absorb all of the added costs related to the passage of Proposition 22 in California. Instead, Chief Financial Officer Nelson Chai said he expected additional wage or benefit costs to be passed along to customers. DoorDash and Grubhub say they are doing the same.

When the state’s voters opted to keep drivers classified as independent contractors, they didn’t necessarily realize they would be picking up the tab for the added benefits drivers got as part of the deal. Yet, on Uber Eats orders in California as of Dec. 14, for example, consumers’ itemized receipts include a “Driver Benefits” fee, which is explained in the app as a direct consequence of Proposition 22.

WASHINGTON—The Treasury Department has decided not to restructure the taxpayers’ stake in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac , effectively ending the Trump administration’s push to ensure that the mortgage giants are eventually returned to private hands.

The announcement by the Treasury Department and the companies’ federal regulator leaves it to the incoming Biden administration to decide the future of the firms, which were put under government control during the 2008-09 financial crisis through a process known as conservatorship.

Advisers close to President-elect Joe Biden have said he would be in no hurry to privatize the companies, which guarantee roughly half of the $11 trillion U.S. mortgage market. Instead, Mr. Biden would focus on ways to use the companies to boost housing affordability and promote homeownership, the advisers said.

Under a more modest agreement announced Thursday by the Treasury Department and the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the mortgage companies will be allowed to retain more of their earnings, boosting their ability to absorb potential losses. FHFA is the companies’ independent federal regulator.

Thursday’s changes to the companies’ bailout agreements allow the firms to retain roughly $280 billion, or the equivalent of what they are required to maintain as part of new,