...there is simply not enough money in public coffers to support the massive investments needed in energy infrastructure in the coming decades.
If governments can't fund infrastructure then who can? After all governments can a) print money, b) borrow, c) raise taxes. Private firms can only borrow (or sell shares which is equivalent).
Is he saying that private firms are more powerful than governments now? Also government is the only type of organization that can afford to run at a loss indefinitely and thus plan for an extended period of uneconomic activity while these new projects are being rolled out. Private firms have shrunk their horizon for investment payback to five years or less for almost every project. The idea that one would create an investment that would take 30 years to fully profit from has disappeared. No more TVA projects, I guess.
If government has abdicated its role then perhaps we don't need one anymore. We can just have the nation of Exxon or the nation of Gazprom instead. In effect it won't be too different from the days of the Dutch East India Company. Policies not Politics ---- Daily Landscape
Private firms are NOT just limited to issuing equity or borrowing.
In Canada, private firms put chunks of their gross revenues into Trust, and the resulting units in "Income Trusts" are hugely popular with Pension Funds, who like to get their hands on corporate revenues before the management do.
Blackstone's recent IPO did not consist of shares in a Blackstone corporation but units in a Limited Partnership.
But even more radical, as I point out - ad nauseam, no doubt - the UK LLP (and US LLC) allows ANY enterprise, public, private, charitable, social, sole trader, whatever to raise capital simply by sharing with Investors the GROSS revenues from a business or from a productive asset which has been financed.
Contrary to conventional wisdom therefore, Governments do NOT need to borrow to obtain investment - they can simply raise what is in effect "Public Equity" by selling forward an agreed proportion of rental revenue or even production (eg electricity)instead. "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
