What Bernanke and many others do not understand is that keeping rates near zero does next to nothing for the economy. Because banks are still in shell-shock status and will be for years to come. They will only lend to people who don't need money and who already have enough of it. Funding is extremely tough to come by these days.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
For 50 of them. This is a very high density multilayer, not an MP3 player board :-)
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
It does keep the deficit down to only 60% of income. If the interest rate goes up, Obama'-s US does a Greece.
There are still crazy realestate loans. The government is funding them.
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I think they understand it all too well, but there's not a lot they can do about it. There are more effective ways of stimulating the economy, but with a Republican majority in congress, the idea of giving money to the poor to spend isn't going to get anywhere.
So what else is new? Some of the banks lost their senses a few years ago and created the US house-price bubble, but now they've learned their lesson - for the moment.
That's what happens after a bubble bursts.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
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There's some support available. It mostly seems to support joint research projects with universities, which doesn't actually involve much money.
But no actual cash.
You seemed to think that a semiconductor fabrication plant was the only possible high tech activity.This isn't true of Scotland or anywhere else. I've got one ex-colleague in Scotland whose high tech activities mostly involve using phase-array ultrasound to find cracks in aircraft wings. The last reports suggested that the firm he works for was finally making quite a bit of money out of it, but I tend to hear less about them when they aren't.
You've adduced evidence that some firms are encouraged to set up in the UK by promises of some government funding. The National Semiconductor fab in Greenock has been there for quite a while, and you've not produced a shred of evidence that they are still getting government money, or that they ever did.
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dHappily, I haven't. But even the military don't buy much mil spec stuff any more.
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Dream on.
. Silicon Valley probably
eSilicon Valley peaked fairly early. At the point where engineers couldn't afford to buy a house within commuting distance of Silicon Valley - and academics like my wife were rejecting jobs in Los Angles because the semiconductor business had pushed house prices into the stratosphere - the high tech start-ups moved to places like Oregon and Salt Lake City.
What's going on there now is third generation stuff. Cambridge Instruments sold electron microscope and electron beam microfabricators to a lot of places outside of Silicon Valley in the
1980's - there were at least as many on the east coast of the USA as in California - so I suspect your point of view is more parochial than you appreciate.-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
It's not going to be this easy. Foreign lenders set the real rates. If they see an increased risk of devaluation of principal (a.k.a. runaway inflation) or a credit risk then the rate goes up no matter what a country's central bank or Fed does. Else there simply won't be government bond buyers on the international markets. That became abundantly clear in Europe a few years ago when Portugal's rate shot above 20%. Others were headed there as well, until they coaxed Germany into (essentially) co-signing the loans. Beats my why the Germans agreed to that. Problem is, we have no country that bails us out because the US is too big and not part of something like the EU.
Yup, seems they might steer us to the next real-estate bubble. 3.5% on a mortgage is crazy. Entices people to buy a bigger house than they can ever pay for.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
It's the same thing. If you get told that you and a few select other valued businesses pay x percent less than everyone else if you relocate then that clearly is a subsidy.
Name? Web site? Ultrasound used to be my home turf and now it's more aircraft stuff. I've never heard of a major supplier from there.
You have never heard about R&D Plus? Amazing. The government chips in
25% if you invest in new processes in Greenock and other areas.Quote "How do you feel about public support mechanisms; are these effective or could they be changed to be more competitive with other geographies?
I applaud the UK Government & Regional Development Agencies as being increasingly supportive of R&D. Greenock has benefitted greatly from R&D Plus in Scotland"
End quote.
This was an official statement from National Semiconductor UK.
Want some numbers? Here is just one of the examples that proves you wrong:
They do.
You can't name any stellar companies of the caliber of Linear Technology and the like? Thought so.
You live in the past. The 80's don't matter no more. What matters is today and I just came back from down there. Yeah, we do have an exodus of companies from California but that is due to our liberal administration that has resulted in one of the worst business climates in America. But it takes more than a few leftist administrations to destroy something like Silicon Valley.
Personally I do not understand how people can live there. For $1k/mo in rent you get barely more than the size of our master bathroom. But the fact is, this is where the music play, and will for many years to come.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
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I don't think that there are 18yo flipping burgers ad McD any more, a machine cooks them. The 18 yo wears gloves and assemble the sandwiches and the 20yo runs the pictographic cash register.
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sMy experience in the U.K. high tech industry was that the tax incentives were marginal, and so hedged with restrictions that people treated them as incidental windfalls - nice if they actually came through, but not big or reliable enough to affect anybody's decisions.
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"Diagnostic Sonar Ltd".
Sure. They would say that, no matter how tiny and erratic the subsidies actually were.
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No numbers.
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Already did - ASML. And asking me to come up with soemthing comparable to Linear Technology, which has been around for quite a while, and is a very direct descendant of Schockley's original initiative, via Fairchild Semiconductor and National Semiconductor, is being somewhat disingenuous.
You sit in California, and think that California is where it's at. Ever been to Tiawan? Or South Korea?
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
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It was that or have the euro-zone fall apart.The costs of dismantling the eurozone are large - at the moment it runs as an integrated market and there's a lot of cross-border trade, and there'd be a lot less if the currency barriers were restored. Germany does very well out of the extra trade.
Saudi Arabia and China keep on buying your securities. You've been running a huge balance of payments deficit since Regan was president, and you ought to be conscious of where the money is coming from, and why.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
My information is quite different. I also had lots of material here, sent from the UK with the incentive offers available. But I threw all this out after while because we don't really want to move there. Don't get me wrong, I like Scotland a lot but it's just to friggin' cold in winter.
Except that this seeems to be more of a distribution business these days:
Same as ... this one:
This one I actually had my hands in a bit. Sorry to burst the bubble, this is not UK but South Korean engineering:
Cutting edge ultrasound technology nowadays comes from America and is the key reason why I am here. There is still an excellent group in Horten, Norway, the former VingMed A/S which is now part of GE. The last group that tried high-end ultrasound stuff in the UK that I remember was an intravascular ultrasound company but they wre completely unable to catch up to the company I worked at (Endosonics) and had to pack it up. We hired all their engineers and moved them to the US :-)
Can you not read anymore? Hint: The number is behind "Amout".
That's only one of the subsidies. In the UK you often need to file a FOI request to get more of them unless you find one published somewhere..
It is not. That's where the future is. Yes, ASML is high-tech but so is IBM/Zygo. Semiconductor manufacturing machines are more of a commodity these days, cutting edge switcher chips are not. Plus ASML is not in the UK business parks.
Yes, I have. If I need a hi-res multiple-GSPS converter or things like that I still have to turn to an American company, you will not find that in Asia.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
My personal opinion is that the northern countries are being fleeced and if reforms in southern parts don't come to fruition a dismantling might be inevitable. I am not talking 10 years from now. One method would be a few countries leaving the zone and if that's not happening that northern ones might have to. The latter could trigger a stampede.
Wrong. Let's move from fiction to the facts, meaning real data and numbers, shall we?
Quote "Net foreign purchases of long-term U.S. securities were $73.8 billion. Of this, net purchases by private foreign investors were $69.0 billion, and net purchases by foreign official institutions were $4.8 billion.
U.S. residents purchased a net $12.6 billion of long-term foreign securities"
It hasn't changed all that much in the last two years from there.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
I don't frequent fast food places a lot, maybe once a year. Last time I was in one (In'n Out Burger) teenagers were still flipping the burgers. AFAIK those franchises only take kids with at least a highschool diploma.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
I think they understand that very well by now, but I think they don't have any other ideas. Allowing rates to rise substantially will likely make things considerably worse. Maintaining QE is probably supposed to convince folks that they are resolute in their determination to keep rates close to zero beyond most folks' planning horizons.
That they appear to have no other actionable ideas is actually what is most scary. Governments actually only have a few inputs (spending, taxation, interest rates) with which to influence the economy and they're ALL pretty much railed atm.
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
-- "it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward" speff@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com
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It's not the northern countries who are being fleeced, but the citizens of Italy and Greece - they've had corrupt governments for a long time now, and they've now realised that this is a luxury they can't afford.
Spain, Portugal and Ireland have just got a lot of catching up to do - the EU can cope with that, as it's been into regional development since it was first put together.
You've been reading too many American commentaries - these incorporate a lot of wishful thinking. The Greeks aren't enthusiastic about paying taxes, but they are even less enthusiastic about becoming dirt poor, which would be the immediate consequence of them leaving the eurozone.
Not wrong, merely unpalatable.
As I read it, that's for the month of July.
But you do recognise that the US negative balance of trade is large and persistent?
and runs at about same level as the nett foreign purchases of US securities. The fact that it's not the Chinese and Saudi governments who are buying the bulk of the securities is irrelevant to the point I was making.
You can afford to import oil that you can't actually pay for because other people are lending you money. Your situation differs from that of the Greeks in one single aspect - the Greeks are members of the EU and the help they get is conditional on Greece getting it's act together, which is happening, if worryingly slowly.
The US isn't doing anything to sort out it's balance of payments deficit, and basically acts as if the rest of the world is going to sell it stuff on credit forever.
Who's got the real problem?
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
Well, there is a secular flow of federal funds from some US states to other states, and that has not caused a breakup of the US yet, so presumably sometimes benefits are felt to be worth it.
As another indicator, there's about a 2:1 variation in GDP per capita between US states, vs. 1.5:1 between Germany and Greece.
FWIW, the Germans I have spoken with about it (admittedly business people and not average citizens) think that they need the markets of the EU as their home turf, so it's worth keeping those guys around, even if it costs them a bit of money.
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
-- "it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward" speff@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com
Obama is subsidizing the downward push with QE-indefinite. The Fed floods the market with paper. That will last at least until February.
As long as it's a fixed rate mortgage, paying for it isn't an issue unless they shouldn't have qualified in the first place. That's the problem, though. Qualification is still way too easy (though I want it to stay that way for at least another year ;).
I'm sure that varies by geography. Here, they're pretty much all college students, since there is a glut of them (>25,000 undergrads in a town of
75,000).
The problem is in te population as well. The insist of remaining able to retire at 60 while germans must now work to about 67 and more. That is going to become a powder keg. If I was living in Germany I'd be livid about that.
Living on the dole from Northern Europe is what happens now, and that can't continue.
No, you were wrong. As evidenced in the link below.
You are deviating. We were talking about the fact that foreign investor are buying lots of US Treasuries at rock bottom prices and I have shown that this is not done just by a few countries. July was only one example, it's happening all the time, every month. Beats me why they do it but the fact is they do it.
[...]
Almost every country does. In the US it can get better but only if we see a change this November. If not it'll likely get worse.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Farm subsidies, mostly. And many people (including myself) do not think those are a good idea.
I've lived there and visited a month ago. My impression of their opinions is a very different one. Some are on the edge of becoming really p....d about it.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
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