[ad_1]
He added, “The market looks like water is much more valuable for urban people.”
Stakeholders range from financial firms and university endowments to investor groups, at least two of which in Colorado led by former governors. Texas oil tanker T. Boone Pickens who died in 2019 was one of the early evangelists of water buying. Another supporter is Michael Burry, the hedge fund manager described by Christian Bale in “The Big Short,” who overdrafted over $ 800 million in the subprime mortgage market in the mid-2000s.
Matthew Diserio, chairman and co-founder of the hedge fund Water Asset Management, called the US water sector “the world’s largest emerging market” and “a trillion dollar market opportunity.”
WAM, based in New York and San Francisco, invests heavily in water-related businesses, and one of its main activities is collecting water rights in arid states like Arizona and Colorado. . Since leaving government, Mr. Eklund has become WAM’s legal advisor and public face.
“They make water a commodity,” said Regina Cobb, the Arizona assembly that represents Cibola. “It’s not what water is supposed to be.”
Private investors would like to integrate or amplify existing elements of Wall Street for the water industry, such as futures markets and trading that takes place in milliseconds. Most would like to see the price of water, long remained silent by utilities and governments, rise sharply.
Traders could exploit volatility, whether due to drought, failing infrastructure or government restrictions. Water markets have been called an “arbitrage haven,” an approach in which professionals use speed of negotiation and access to information for profit. The situation has been compared to the energy markets of the late 1990s, in which companies like Enron made money through shortages (some of which, it turned out, traders designed for themselves. same).
Many see the pact as a safeguard isolating the river from the market.
Negotiating states will focus on restoring the flow of the Colorado River, which has been so diminished by use that from 1998 to 2014, it did not even reach its natural terminus in the Gulf of California. But they will also seek to rebalance water levels in Lakes Powell and Mead, two federally owned reservoirs that hold water for use in extreme drought.
[ad_2]
Source link