This is from an FT email this morning:
Commonly-backed “project bonds” pilot to fund pan-European infrastructure projects were approved by EU diplomats on Monday and will be discussed by EU leaders at a summit meeting on Wednesday, reports the FT. The small trial, the first element of a new “growth compact”, would see about €230m in EU funds allocated through 2013 to back the bonds, which would finance cross-border transport, communications and energy infrastructure programmes that are frequently ignored by individual member states. The plan is backed by French president Francois Hollande but documents seen by the FT suggest that the trial was original intended to run to 2015, but Germany requested a shorter trial.
I've been arguing for such bonds since 2003, and have done so through the Green New Deal since 2008. It's a shame that they've taken so long to cotton on.
And it's shame that the su is so small. I argue for £20 billion of such investment in the UK alone and discuss how to fund it here. Give it a year or two and they'll see the merit of what we proposed years ago.
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Hmm.. Sounds like PFI, using a different banker, that will probably end up being the same banker.
It also sounds like yet another pot to raid for ‘legacy’ projects. Every govt since it’s inception has raided the pension pot, now they’ve got another one to overspend on.
So, ‘cash-strapped’ Blighty will have someone else to owe money to, having not long paid off our war debt to the usa. Yet another reason to enforce austerity measures on the poor, by the historically overspending tories.
EU, thanks for the offer of a loan, I say just bin it like all the other junk mail that I recieve offering me loans..
OK – how else are you going to fund investment in public infrastructure?
And how else are you going to break the downward spiral of investment?
Yep, I agree, how are we going to break the downward spiral of investment? How about the Govt not wasting so much money on pet projects, too numerous to mention. Hiring builders, civil engineers etc, direct. No middle-men, like building companies, go back to ‘building corporations’ that built Letchworth, Stevenage and Welwyn Garden City. Far cheaper, when there is no profit motive, and with less bureaucracy to slow it all down, a way of supplying jobs with a future and training…
There is more than enough money to support this, it’s being diverted to shareholders at the moment, it doesn’t have to be.
It’s now time for politicians to realise that WE employ them, not vice versa!
This is one of Richard’s better ideas; I can see no possible reason not to support it.