Eschaton: What Is An Infrastructure Bank?

Another edition of What Atrios Said:

I've asked this question a few times, and never had an answer. It
seems to involve a small amount of government money which can obtain
magical leverage (how?) from the free market ponies that then build
infrastructure and after stealing all of our underpants there is
profit.

At a time when the government can borrow for negative real interest rates.

(It's bad enough I stole his whole post, but I'm also stealing from his
style book. I should be ashamed of myself, but I'm not, because its an
excellent question.)

This ideological obsession with public-private partnerships is unhealthy.  Efficiency be damned, let's create a private skim, which creates a constituency, so we can sell infrastructure investment.

It's cynical, graft-laden crap.