🏈 Stadium-subsidy szn

Upgrading the kiss cam… with a little help from taxpayers. The Carolina Panthers secured $650M in public funds this week to renovate Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium. That’s half the $1.3B expected cost to upgrade the nearly 30-year-old facility. (FYI: the Panthers ended last season with the worst record in the NFL.) Nearly 400 miles south, Jacksonville taxpayers will kick in $775M toward the Jaguars’ $1.4B revamp of EverBank Stadium. Economists have said that stadium subsidies don’t provide a net economic benefit for their surrounding metros. The practice doesn’t look to be letting up:

• The border war: Kansas officials last week passed a law that would help cover 70% of the expected $3.5B cost of new stadiums if the Chiefs and Royals moved from Missouri.

• Browns’ noise: In Cleveland, lawmakers are considering $600M in state funding for a new stadium for the Browns. That would amount to 12x Ohio’s record for state spending on a single pro-stadium project.

The money’s not here… Taxpayers have spent ~$30B on stadiums since 1990, but researchers have said the projects — often pitched as investments in jobs and growth — haven’t resulted in notable ROI for taxpayers. A 2021 New York analysis of the state’s $850M stadium subsidy for the Buffalo Bills said the largest revenue source from the deal would come from income taxes paid by the team’s players.

Slidin’ down the mountain… Bitcoin had a rough week. The OG crypto fell below $60K on Monday and has struggled to climb back to its mid-March highs. The price stumble came after Mt. Gox, a defunct bitcoin exchange, said it would start repaying $8.5B in bitcoin and bitcoin cash to its creditors next month. Some investors feared the newly coin-rich creditors might immediately sell their crypto, which could flood the market and push prices down.

• Adding fuel: Traders pointed to the German gov’t, which last week was said to have sold $325M in BTC seized from the operators of a movie-piracy site (authorities confiscated ~$3B).

• Dragged down: Crypto-linked companies like Coinbase and MicroStrategy also saw their share prices slip early this week.

Worth the wait… Tokyo-based Mt. Gox collapsed and declared bankruptcy in 2014 after a series of hacks, placing 24K customers’ digi assets in legal limbo. At the time, one bitcoin was worth ~$600. Now the Mt. Gox users who’ve been waiting a decade will be (partially) repaid coins worth more than 100x that amount. But not everyone thinks they’ll rush to cash in on their newfound coin wealth. Galaxy Research, a digital asset and blockchain biz, wrote on X that many creditors had the opportunity to sell their claims long ago. Aka: if those Mt. Gox customers are still holding out, they may be in crypto for the long haul.