Back in the day, Madrid’s Palace Hotel was Ernest Hemingway’s old haunt, or at least the bar was. Now, rooms at the posh hotel just down from the famed Prado Museum go for up to $6,000 a night. And gathering in its lobby these days? An altogether different type of foreigner: the kind in expensive suits.
“Probably they are institutional investors, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds,” says Federico Steinberg, an economist at Madrid’s Elcano Institute.
There’s a lot of cash around the world, he says, and a lot of people looking for bargains.
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