Illustrating How Infrastructure Deals Result in High Fees and Diminished Service
It isn’t hard to understand why infrastructure deals (the sale of government owned assets to private investors) are inherently a ripoff. We’ve had such a vogue for private contracting that a lot of services that are almost certainly more cheaply run by the government (e.g., logistical support for the military as proven by Iraq profiteering by Blackwater) that it’s a pretty safe assumption that most assets now held by government bodies are the the sort of thing that it makes sense for the government to own: high cost to build, long lived, not terribly complex to maintain assets.
Infrastructure investors like to see returns in the mid to upper teens. The deals are complicated to put together, so the fees are high. The deal needs to generate enough to pay the fees and generate the required returns. Since it is pretty much impossible to run something like a parking meters “smarter”, the usual course of action is a combination of increasing charges to the users (taxpayers who in the past used it for free or much less) and cut maintenance costs.
The Sydney-based investment bank Macquarie pioneered this business. Reader Crocodile Chuck pointed us to one of its latest capers. From the Sydney Morning Herald:
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