Russian investment bank Renaissance Capital was a big backer of Moscow’s ambition to become a major emerging-markets financial centre, a bridge between European and Asian capital, a rival to Dubai.

    It not only trumpeted the idea, but was one of the first big local firms to take out offices in a sleek glass skyscraper by the Moscow River, surrounded by foundation pits and towers of naked steel girders that were to become Moscow’s Canary Wharf.

Rich Kinder, CEO of Kinder Morgan Energy Partners, says the Obama Administration’s push to develop alternative energy sources such as wind and solar are not the answer to reducing the nation’s dependence on oil or reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Click below to hear where Kinder thinks the U.S. should be focusing its attention.

Kinder: wind, solar not the answer from Reuters TV on Vimeo.

Unfortunately, we do.

All the infrastructure projects in the world sound great! They look awesome on paper, they’ll make people’s lives better and they’ll let us go visit our friends and families in about half the time it used to take.

It’ll be a dream world!!

Well, unfortunately, we are going to have to pay for all these projects at some point and all of the guests at this year’s Reuters Infrastructure Summit acknowledge that the paying is the hardest part.

But Professor Richard Little, from the Keston Institute for Public Finance and Infrastructure Policy at the University of Southern California, started off with the problem of paying and suggested a few different methods to be considered.

Little, one of those great guests who actually speaks in full thoughts and complete sentences, said that ideas of the moment that might be in vogue (like the public-private partnerships) are all well and good, but are only part of what the country is going to need to do to actually fix its many needs.

Little is an advocate for putting much of the pension, Social Security and defined benefit money to work for the nation’s infrastructure needs. Will it work? Well, for sure there’s a lot of money that can be used and he thinks the American investor would be more willing to buy bonds if they knew they were helping build a bridge or a school or improving rails.

Little was one of the featured speakers at the first day of the Summit, which continues through the end of the week in our New York, San Francisco and Washington, DC offices.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Or bridge. Or turnpike.

Every project we’re talking about at Reuters first-ever Reuters Infrastructure Summit has an enormous cost — sometimes in the hundreds of billions of dollars. And governments are looking for ways to pay for it all.

Enter public-private partnerships (or P3s as we cool, infrastructure types like to say these days). In these deals, governments will lease or sell an asset to a group of investors for a certain big up-front fee and then they will pay the government a certain per-year fee for the right.

For Ambassador Felix Rohatyn, former executive at Lazard Freres and crafter of the New York City economic rescue in the mid-1970s, these are good ideas, but they don’t come without a cost.

Rohatyn, one of the featured guests at this year’s summit and author of a new book on big U.S. infrastructure projects called “Bold Endeavors“, said that in general P3s are a good thing as they should give governments more flexibility to do the things they need to do. But like everything, they carry some risk and officials should go into these deals with their eyes open.

The Reuters Infrastructure Summit continues through the end of this week in New York, San Francisco and Washington.

Infrastructure spending. Public-private partnerships. Government buildouts.

This week, all of these kinds of phrases are much on the mind of our guests at the first ever Reuters Infrastructure Summit held in New York, San Francisco and Washington.

While infrastructure means different things to almost all of our guests (schools, roads, bridges, etc) — one of our first guests, Petra Todorovich, talked at length about the need for high speed rails.

Todorovich, the director of the Regional Plan Association’s America 2050 project, told Reuters that buiding the high-speed rails makes a great deal of sense for travel, business and infrastructure.

What model would she use? Try the airlines. While equity investors might feel a cold wind blowing through their portfolios at the mention of the perpetually difficult-to-predict sector, Todorovich likes the way the industry melds its private side with its public financing.

Todorovich also spoke about other models for infrastructure spending that different locales have used.

Todorovich was one of the first speakers at this year’s summit, which runs through the end of this week.

The Obama Administration has made infrastructure spending one of its top priorities as the nation grapples with mounting needs for its roads, bridges, water supply, power grid, schools and solid waste. As states and other municipalities struggle to find innovative financing for hundreds of billions of dollars of projects, new investments will soon be available for both individuals and institutions.
 
The increase in private-public partnerships is one topic high on financiers’ radar screens as localities are under more pressure to get projects started and obtain the needed funding for them. “Infrastructure” as a concept has become something of a catch-all and we will be pressing our guests to discuss how worried they are that less-critical projects will get piled into more important ones.
 
How will California deal with its growing water need? What’s the outlook for infrastructure for investors? How hamstrung are governments with all the need?  How tenuous are ratings? How long a window is there for these projects, politically?