Utilitywise Collapse Shows The Energy Markets Are Working

We can tell how this is going to go, can’t we? One of the energy companies, Utilitywise, has just collapsed and this shows that we should all go back to the Good Old Days of the CEGB and us all just getting the energy we should damn well be grateful for. Jezza’s our man and all that.

Which is to entirely miss how markets do and should work of course:

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] Britain’s largest energy broker has collapsed into administration after an eleventh hour lifeline from the company’s founder failed to save its 1,000 strong workforce. Utilitywise slumped into administration after rescue talks with potential investors, including its former chairman, fell apart just weeks after it put itself up for sale. It is the largest energy market failure of recent years including the ten energy suppliers which have crashed out of the market in the last year alone. [/perfectpullquote]

Companies are supposed to go bust in a market, that’s the point of them.

All sorts of people have all sorts of ideas about how things should or could be done. We consumers out here have all manner of ideas of what we’d like. The universe places certain physical limitations upon what can be done. So, we desire a method of sorting through that trio – what might be done, what can be done, what we’d like done. Which is what markets provide us with. The ability to try out new things, see if they accord with reality and consumer desire.

This is the very point of a market based economic system, that people do go bust. Those who discover a new method of doing something, one that works and that we sign up to, make profits and buy those fleets of Ferraris. Those who f**k up go bankrupt. Utilitywise collapsing isn’t a failure of the energy market it’s the very point of that market’s existence. For that’s the way we experiment to find out what works.