Libertarian presidential candidates, including the late Harry Browne, used to say we could balance the budget and make victims of the Social Security ponzi scheme whole just by selling off state-owned assets - like the Grand Canyon. It's one of the reason his two campaigns were so successful.
In any case, Greece and other trouble European nations have been talking about doing something like that for real - involving state owned companies - but according to Elisa Martinuzzi and Maria Petrakis of Bloomberg News, even these desperate moves may not be enough to stave off default. The problem is that all the potential buyers know a desperate seller when they see one.
The European sales face growing competition from similar assets elsewhere, according to Daniel Wong, head of European infrastructure and utilities at Macquarie Capital in London.
“There are definitely more assets in the energy and infrastructure space on the market than there were two years ago,” Wong said. “This means, where the assets are not performing well or are structurally complicated, they tend to fall off the buyers’ lists relatively quickly.”
The article is an excellent summary off the fruits of socialism - all the state-owned companies that politicians used to keep their relatives employed in good times - gone sour.
“At this stage, debt-ridden European countries have no other options but to sell assets,” said Carles Vergara, a finance professor at IESE Business School in Madrid. “It’s the only way left to obtain extraordinary income quickly without further cutting spending or increasing taxes. State-owned assets are there for governments to be able to raise cash in moments of crisis, and this is a crisis if ever there was one.”
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