Oh, The Incentives!

Chicago would be responsible for as much as $500 million if the 2016 Olympic Games operated in the red and other guarantees fell short, officials said Friday.

Here’s the article. Wow. What is the incentive to control costs when other people will pay your overruns? Of course the IOC is using its monopoly status to suck as much as it can from public coffers (HT to Don Coffin). But back to the first article.

But Chicago 2016 Chairman Patrick Ryan insisted that no other host city has ever lost money in the Summer Games, and “we would have to be the first really incompetents to do that” if the reserves had to be tapped.

This sounds like the twin-from-a-parallel-universe of Paul Beeston’s famous quote “I can turn a $4 million dollar profit into a $2 million loss and get every national accounting firm to agree with me.

And it’s not always about accounting revenues and losses.

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Author: Phil Miller

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