Well, that didn’t take long. Less than a month ago, Mauricio Macri, the former president of Boca Juniors and mayor of Buenos Aires, was elected Argentina’s new president. Today, the country is dropping its currency controls. Buyers of Argentine players should take note. Macri follows Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, whose administration was, among other things, an enormous machine for creating and then denying the existence of inflation. Prices rising at 20-30% annually would normally send a currency cratering, but Fernández used billions in foreign reserves to prop up the peso while curtailing her compatriots’ ability to exchange it for dollars…
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In every transfer window, fans around the world ooh and aah about the high price of players, especially in the Premier League. Fees and wages seem astronomical, and a few pundits always try to compare them to prices from the past. They’re usually making comparisons that would drive an economist mad. Inflation is word we see in a lot of these analyses. But what is inflation? It’s the rate of change of a price for something specific and well defined: a fresh Granny Smith apple, an hour of work by an experienced janitor in Manhattan, or a matinee ticket to…
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By now everyone knows that the English Premier League has signed a blockbuster deal for broadcasting rights in the United Kingdom. The pact with Sky and BT will bring the 20 lucky clubs about £1.7 billion annually for three years starting after next season. It’s a huge sum – more than any other league earns – and an increase of more than 70 percent over the last three-year package. It’s also a windfall, since the clubs don’t have to change their operations or incur additional costs in order to get it. So where will all that money go, and how…
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