I think it’s 10,000 euros not $.
What about Mirabel in Montreal? Or that one in the Illinois suburbs of St. Louis that was going to be a new hub for TWA?
I wonder if Spain will honor the sale or declare it void.
Considering what property taxes, regulatory compliance, et al will be on the property, that’s not a casual purchase. You don’t buy a property like that without a plan to do something with it; the buyer gets a complete airport in a hard-to-acquire location, and Spain gets a massive piece of dead real estate up & functioning again.
Smart buy.
You don’t see American companies doing much that’s smart anymore.
Profits and entrepreneurialism are punished, taxed, and targeted.
Top Gear did a show down there a few years ago.
It’s not just this airport that’s deserted. Square miles of multi-story appartment buildings as well. They were racing through ghost towns.
A perfect example of the views of Austrian Economics.
Keynesians would say “at least that money provided jobs, which meant wages to many workers in the area, which meant that there was a significant economic multiplier for other businesses.”
Austrians would say: No - fake interest rates, printed money and easy debt which distorted the market for this project actually makes it economically destructive. The debt which must be written off, the materials wasted, and the subsequent bust will be more destructive than the brief economic high created by the building of this useless airport.
Hmmmm. Didn’t Jeremy Clarkson and his two buddies use the runways in one of their shows a few seasons ago for some high speed car shenanigans?
I was reading an article about 10 abandoned airports... and they had Stapleton along with 2 new airports in Spain - which one was this.
As a Boy Scout (way back when, before social engineering hit) I was obligated to sit in on a town council meeting. During the couple hours of remarkable boredom, the council took up the question of the town selling its antique fire truck to the privately-held fire department. After 20 minutes of bickering (how much _do_ you sell an antique fire truck for when you weren’t looking to sell, the buyer is sentimental, and whatever it’s worth is either insufferably high or pointlessly low), they finally settled on a sale price of $1. The point I learned was that sometimes a thing is “sold” to make the transfer for the sake of transferring official, with no interest in actually making anything off the sale.
Comparable: some CEOs have a salary of $1. Yes, one dollar per year. Steve Jobs was a famous example, but not the only one.
An airport for $10,800? the whole thing, however bad shape it may be in? That’s not a sale price, that’s just giving it away. Really. A check was written just so the in-place bureaucracy had something to work with. “Here, take the airport for free ... just give me ten grand in Euros just so it looks like we actually sold it.”