What's anti-American in pointing out that stock markets around the world have all gone done in the past week in reaction to to reports that several of the U.S. "sub-prime" mortgage sellers are in financial problems because their clients are having to default on their mortages in large enough numbers to depress the housing market?
What would be a "pro-American" stance? That of an ostrich with its head buried in the sand?
I was a home owner in England in 1990 when that housing price bubble burst
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and didn't enjoy the experience much. My wife and I are in the process of buying a flat in Sydney for what might well be an inflated price ...
I heard an nth-hand rumor to the effect that TI had decided to close the old BB fab in Tucson (might have been 4" for all I know!) and transfer production to a newer fab, capable of running bigger wafers on more modern equipment, somewhere in Texas. That was Part 1 of the rumor.
If you've been around long enough you already know Part 2 - the transfer is not going well, leading to parts shortages despite any precautions (safety stock, die/wafer bank, etc.) they may have taken.
I'm in no position to know, just passing along rumors. Now it's off to estimate the value of my home in gallons of maple syrup, or perhaps acres of aluminum foil.
Thanks for dragging this thing back on rails. This puts pressure on some second source parts which are also becoming hard to get. I also had apparently bad batch of INA163 which have large offsets on the intermediate stage pins. As for the rest of you who do not wish to ride this train:
You don't pay very close attention, eh? January previously owned=20 hosing took a rather large upswing. The US stock market, similar.=20 Since you are making a point of this week's news, both the NASDAQ and=20 DJIA are up 2.5% for the week. Not exactly what I'd call a disaster.
No, you and a certain dumb donkey ceasing to breathe.
I have been Slowman. You said the world markets ALL (emphasis mine)=20 went down this week because of the sub-prime mortgage news.
Unlike you and the dumb donkey, I do think positively. Life is=20 grand! I was thinking in a particularly positive light when I wrote=20 that line. :-)
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
America: Land of the Free, Because of the Brave
Your perennial hope that terrible things will happen to the US. They likely won't in your lifetime, you know. You take hope in the occasional negative glitch, but the longterm trends are good. Sorry.
You could try shutting up. This ostrich thing implies that you are anticipating disaster. I'm not. My only problem is how really hard it is to find employees these days.
Bubbles always do, and the people who wait til the peak to jump in are the ones that get hosed. I bought my house at "the worst possible time" so it's worth maybe 4x what I paid for it. In California, property tax is pinned to the purchase price, even better.
Continental Europe has a bigger problem: unless people start making babies fast, it's facing a population demographic on the scale of the Black Death. What will that do for the housing market? For industry? For defense? Whatever, it won't be a glitch. Hey, maybe I can buy a villa or two in Tuscany.
I'd much prefer that they didn't - when the U.S. sneezes, Europe and Australia catch cold. The fact that the U.S. has been running a huge balance of payments deficit for the past twenty years is rather worrying from this point of view, and I'd greatly prefer the sort of soft landing that a responsible administration might be able to engineer, if you ever manage to elect one with some kind of contact with reality.
I do hope you are right.
That is the ostrich thing. New Orleans didn't anticipate Katrina, and it cost them dearly. Anticipating disaster - as opposed to expecting disaster - involves making sure that if something does go wrong, the equivalents of the dykes, or oil reserves or whatever are available to minimise the consequences.
The current crisis in the "sub-prime" mortgage market has a lot in common with the savings and loan disaster of the 1980's. Those who don't know history are condemned to repeat it.
You probably need to spread your net a little wider.
So how do you know when a market has peaked? And where do you live while you are waiting to find out?
You can certainly buy villas in France and Belgium - the slow transformation of European agriculture to Australian and American levels of productivity has freed up an enormous number of houses in the country-side that were built to accomodate agricultural workers and administrators back when it took 50% of the population to feed the other 50%, rather than the 3% that now feed the remaining 97%.
The rural housing market collasped a long time ago - you won't have to pay much for your decrepit villa and the estate that surrounds it, though rennovating it to the point that you could live in it will cost you.
City accomodation is expensive, and it isn't easy to find land to build more of it - the town planners are looking forward to the forecast population decline to solve that particular problem. The governments have started raising the retirment age - it is now going to be 68 in Germany for anybody born after 1950 - to keep up the supply of workers while the age structure is skewed.
It would only be Anti-American if Bill had shown any signs of welcoming or enjoying such news.
That's one of the things that are being hyped as much as global warming, and are based on just about as shaky evidence. Fact is that although the number of babies a women has while she is fertile seems to be data that is awfully easy to obtain, no one really has a clue. The same goes for hard facts about migration, legal or illegal. Although nobody doubts that Western Europe's population is stagnating or shrinking (just as nobody doubts that the climate is getting warmer), much of the demographic panic in Europe is little more than inflated media hype. Europe is one of the most densely populated areas on Earth, so a little correction may not be the worst of things to happen.
The foreign trade defecit will be a problem only if someone does try to "engineer" it. If the dollar drops a bit more, Boeing will be happy and Airbus may go under.
I grew up in New Orleans, and was up all night when the eye of Betsy passed over the city, leaving devastation. The Lakefront flooded then, too. Everybody knew the "ideal" hurricane (and Katrina wasn't even that) would eventually cover the city, and the pumping stations, with
12 feet of water. But the Big Easy, The City that Care Forgot, Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulle (really, that's the way they say it), forgot to care. Hell, it took them 20 years to install guard rails on some terrible roadway curves, and then they installed them backwards, sharp edge out.
Anticipating disaster - as opposed to expecting
My last hire was from Houston. I met him here.
When it is accepted wisdom that real estate is a good investment, and everybody is doing it.
The dollar is going to have to drop a great deal more before your balance of trade gets back into equlibirium. That won't save Boeing - the A380 is a step ahead of Boeing, with its "Glare" composite structural panels, and once Airbus has finished sorting out the production problems they will wipe the floor with Boeing.
New Orleans isn't all that special in this respect - read up on the
1953 floods in the Netherlands, when the North Sea rolled over the dykes and some 1300 people drowned, or read Jared Diamond's "Collapse" (ISBN-10: 0143036556 ISBN-13: 978-0143036555) which describes a few other complacent administrations squandering their way to disaster. I suspect that Dubbya has a good chance of featuring in the second edition.
So you aren't casting your net all that wide.
That sorts of works for the stock market, but the only time when people act as if real estate isn't a good investment is while prices are actively declining after a bubble has burst.
Hilarious. More hurt-America wishful thinking. Power8 is dead in the water, as was Plan6 or whatever they called it. Boeing will let Airbus have the business it doesn't want or can't handle. A380 will have to sell over 400 planes to break even... so far. A350XWB is a fiasco. The damage is rippling down the supply chain. Airbus is heavily discounting both planes, even to the extent of cash rebates *now* on planes that won't be delivered for years, to keep customers from bailing. That's practically bribery.
EADS/Airbus has more political problems than production problems. BAE was smart to pull out of this flying turkey farm.
Houston is pretty far from here; the USA is *big*. Importing someone from another country is more than I want to be responsible for. I have receive a goodly number of resumes from Canada lately.
True, but if you've had to redesign the wiring because the German and French design software packages are incompatible, you do have to crawl to the customers to keep them onside while the delivery times keep on stretching.
The production problems reflect the political problems - Boeing isn't immune from that sort of problem either.
No British-managed company ever did anything smart ...
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Strictly speaking, you want to hold back until the market hits bottom
- or at least until it looks as if it has levelled off. Buying while prices are still declining can leave you stuck with a mortgage gap for a couple of years.
I work with a couple of BAE divisions in the USA. All the people I've worked with are nice, professional, and *very* smart. The aerospace industry has the lowest doofus ratio of anything I've encountered. Of course, I have no direct experience with Airbus.
I think BAE works like EG&G used to: acquire small/medium sized companies with talent, give them a bit of marketing, management, and financial support, set profitability goals, and step back.
We do work with an EADS/US group on some non-Airbus project - they won't tell me exactly what - and they seem fine.
The U.K. produces a disproportionate number of accountants in the same sort of way that the U.S. produces a disproportionate number of lawyers, and U.K. management is dominated by accountants.
The archetypical U.K. manager was Arnold Weinstock
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who was chairman of the British General Electric company for most of the time I lived in the U.K.
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He didn't invest in research and development - GE(U.K.) expanded by taking over other companies who had, and basically stopped them from spending money development once they had been taken over. G.E.(U.K.) did have a central research laboratory - the Hirst Centre - which did do good work up until the late 1950's, when the accountants wrecked it. I had some contact with people who worked there when I was working for the EMI Central Research Lab (which went the same way - it doesn't exist and more - but much later) and they were a thoroughly demoralised bunch.
It sounds as if BAE works the same way - the "bit of marketing, management, and financial support, set profitability goals" will involve controlling the investment in new development on the basis of discounted cash flow, discounted over a relatively short term, which makes it imposible to keep your technology up to date. The smart people who should be doing R&D are sent out into the field to make short term profits, at the expense of long term survival.
You won't see the hollowing-out process from your point of view. I had a couple of job interviews with companies the GE(UK) had taken over, and I soon learned that they weren't places where I'd want to work.
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
America: Land of the Free, Because of the Brave
Sounds like what we heard from arrow about the 26 week lead time on the PGA206, at the end of which we were told "Oops, you were too far down on the list - wait another 26 weeks and MAYBE you'll get some parts."
So does anyone know a broker that has some, or a pin compatible replacement?
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