Can you have too much of a good thing? Infrastructure market watchers are beginning to wonder if record amounts of uninvested capital will spur inflated values and eventually undermine returns. Or will it be a Mae West situation where, “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.”

These are heady days for U.S. oil and gas. The shale energy boom is now making its impact felt across not just the United States but worldwide, through both huge investments in domestic production of energy-intensive products such as chemicals as well as the prospect of natural gas being exported through the construction of liquefied natural gas export terminals.

The following article is an excerpt from Private Infrastructure Finance and Investment in Europe, a report commissioned by the European Investment Bank. The entire report with footnotes and references is available at https://www.georginderst.com/ and the Social Science Research Network page: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2359648.