He has flown to Vancouver, Canada, to meet Walter Wolf, an enigmatic Austrian-Canadian businessman who once campaigned a private Formula 1 racing team, and is thought to have largely bankrolled Lamborghini through the 1970s.
Preliminary work, including some track upgrading for higher speed trains, is under way, though public-private financing formulas and multistate coordination difficulties remain big hurdles.
Whenever the Tories are in power, an underfunded NHS staggers, allowing outriders to claim this proves it's "unsustainable", in need of some other (private) funding formula.
At Harvard, Neil Rudenstine created a private time-distribution formula to keep his priorities straight: he told himself he would devote no less than half his time to the intellectual life of the institution — academic planning, faculty searches, tenured appointments — and no more than a third to fund-raising.
Better question: Whose idea was it to spark a private effort at Formula 1 when, even nearly 40 years ago, major corporations were behind the most successful teams?
In the most widely used private college aid formula a family of four reaches a 46% marginal rate on only $66,000 of available aftertax income, says Sandy Baum, senior policy analyst at the College Board.
The thriftiest and more affluent of these families might have combined retirement assets and home equity large enough to be partially counted in private-college aid formulas, so they're more likely to be ineligible for any financial aid, and may not have lower tax brackets during their retirement years.
For other public or private bills, the formula is simply "La Reyne le veult" ("the Queen wills it").
The freedom to develop and deploy new technologies, unless and until it is shown definitively that those technologies are dangerous, was a great formula for private sector innovation, but it is not a great formula for state-based rivalries and it has not shown itself to be a route to improved digital security.
But just as yesterday's revolutionary proclamations turn into tomorrow's formulas, the private-eye sorties have for years been foiled by their own central convention, notably the tough, sentimental, deep-down-decent hero with his snappy cracks.
The formula that private lenders use to do this analysis is often hidden or remarkably opaque.
