Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 10:11 AM by Gene

Eighteen months after ONE OF THE GREATEST ACHIEVEMENTS IN HISTORY:

In the year after the Olympics, the iconic 91,000-seat Bird’s Nest hosted a Jackie Chan concert, an Italian soccer match, an opera and a presentation of Chinese singing standards. But the local soccer team declined a deal to make it their home field, and the only tenants now are tourists who pay $7 to visit the souvenir shop.

By most accounts, the vendors hawking trinkets outside the stadium outnumber the foreigners who go there to gawk.

Outsiders may find this wasteful. After all, Atlanta’s Olympic stadium became a baseball park, and Calgary’s Saddledome a civic fixture.

Then again, the Olympics seem to bring out profligacy in even buttoned-down governments. Consider Athens, where 21 of the 22 stadiums erected for the 2004 Olympics were reported last year to be unoccupied. The $14.4 billion cost of that party is being cited by some as a source of Greece’s potentially destabilizing fiscal troubles. [Emphasis added]

GEE THANKS, LORDS OF LAUSANNE -- AND VERY VERY LITTLER JEFFY!

If you build it, the feeling is, they will come. Eventually, in a nation this large, someone will fill the convention center and the water park. And if not, well, build it anyway. Building creates jobs, and feeds prestige, and pumps up the GDP. Here in the nation that is too big to fail, as long as the bad loans don’t overwhelm the good, the waste is tolerable.

“That, to me, is the essence of the Chinese strategy,” Eswar Prasad, a Cornell University professor and a former head of the International Monetary Fund’s China division, said in a recent telephone interview. “Just keep the machine going fast enough.”

So what if the machine's a broken-down rattletrap with counterfeit replacement parts?