| This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a happy family of Bloomberg Opinion's opinions. Sign up here.  Leo Tolstoy, seen here being happy. Photographer: Rischgitz/Hulton Archive/Getty Images "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," according to Leo Tolstoy, the idea being that there are many ways for things to go wrong and only one way for them to go right. Which, sure, but then again maybe not quite as much as was the case in 19th-century Russia? Or at least some unhappy families can be kind of alike? My current unhappy family looks a lot like the unhappy family that raised me, for example. You get one guess as to what they have in common. Anyway, disasters can at least share traits. Back in March 2020, Clara Ferreira Marques wrote a great and prescient column comparing the pandemic to the financial crisis. The latter involved the flow of credit, while the former involved the flow of people. Both turned out to be economically ruinous, as Clara predicted. Then there's the U.K.'s energy crisis. Yes, it involves the flow of energy, or the lack thereof. But more than that, Chris Bryant writes, it involves a bunch of energy providers going under due to "a lack of financial resiliency, light-touch regulation and unsustainable pricing practices that left the industry unprepared for its Black Swan moment." Golly, where have we heard that before? The result is many more unhappy families in the U.K. with at least one gripe in common: much higher gas bills. Of course, if you zoom out on Europe's energy catastrophe to an "Anna Karenina"-scale remove, the story gets much more complex, with lots of idiosyncratic triggers. One of these is famous Tolstoy fan Vladimir Putin. Europe has given Russia's current tsar an alarming level of power over its energy market, John Authers writes, as he demonstrated this week by calming it with some words that loosely translate to "Nice resting body temperature you've got there. Shame if something should happen to it." It sounded nicer in the original Russian! This is a European policy failure that could be compounded by an American one. Faced with rising gas prices and falling approval ratings at home, President Joe Biden might be considering cutting off gas exports to Europe. This would be a mistake for a lot of reasons, writes Liam Denning, and not just because it would give Putin still more power. It would also, after some Tolstoyesque twists, lead to even higher gas prices in the future, making still more families, and voters, unhappy. It's easy to forget now, but a couple of years ago the economy's biggest problem was then-President Donald Trump's trade war with China. As we wrote ad nauseam, Trump's tariffs hurt U.S. consumers and businesses while changing bupkis about China's behavior. This week Biden's trade representative offered an updated assessment on these tariffs and found they remained as pointless and terrible as ever, Ramesh Ponnuru notes. Given that - there's a new president in the White House and
- the tariffs are, as mentioned above, pointless and terrible,
you might think those tariffs would be gone. You would be wrong. They are still pointless, terrible and in full effect. It's Biden's trade war now. And it's still a loser. It's tough to hear over the screeching of the inflation hawks, but if you listen carefully, you can just make out the sounds of an economy that may be starting to get back to something like normal. The delta-variant Covid wave keeps receding, and now young kids could be eligible for vaccines as soon as next month. Americans still aren't exactly rushing to jam into airplanes. But this may not be a terrible time to start thinking about a foreign trip, especially if you're vaccinated, Brooke Sutherland writes. (And if you're not, what's your problem?) She recently flew to France, a thing about which I am nothing but 100% supportive and not at all seething with jealousy, and found the process remarkably smooth. In fact, the U.S. might be one of the world's least convenient countries in which to travel. You might want to get in on this trend before it gets expensive, too. Bonus Pandemic Reading: All your questions about Merck's new Covid pills, answered. — Sam Fazeli and Max Nisen Letting big companies ditch polluting assets isn't enough, if they just go to less-accountable owners. — Bloomberg's editorial board Fed leaders should put their portfolios in blind trusts to avoid impropriety. — Brian Chappatta and Alexis Leondis The legitimate parts of the U.S. political process are often messy, and they should be. — Jonathan Bernstein The Fed propping up junk bonds has spawned a risky family of junk-bond ETFs. — Brian Chappatta Instead of berating U.K. businesses, Boris Johnson should work with them on labor shortages. — Therese Raphael The debt ceiling is still not dead, but is at least delayed. Heart problems can linger for a year after a Covid infection. Where is Tether's money? (Matt Levine asks the same thing.) Chipmunks cause an energy crisis. (h/t Ellen Kominers) Diet soda may make people crave food. How to break a phone addiction. How Netflix picks its thumbnails. (h/t Jessica Karl)  Notes: Please send thumbnails and complaints to Mark Gongloff at mgongloff1@bloomberg.net. Sign up here and follow us on Twitter and Facebook. | 
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