hi Maurice Winn,
The USA is creating a Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere. The USA is Colinizing the world with a Condominium [lead by Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice - GeorgeW just collects the salary, they run the show].
nice theory. reality looks more like a Colonoscopy to me. too bad that according to wsj, nasdaq companies have collectively not made a single dime during the past five years. apparently america has been embarking on a deranged malinvestment spree. past champions like lucent and amazon have not made a single dime during their entire corporate existence. tantalizing stories like metricom and globalstar devoured the funds sent to america by naive investors--foreigners and americans alike--who were looking to make a quick buck.
QUALCOMM ships a lot of the dollars home as profits, pays taxes to USS Enterprise to maintain the system and pays the shareholders the rest [or reinvests in more expansion].
you think CDMA technology is a net profit maker for north america? let's see...the leading corporate backers of cdma in north america are nortel, lucent and motorola - who clocked in losses topping 20 billion dollars during the last quarter.
and what about QCOM? personally, i would like to see QCOM restate their earnings for the past five years. here is something i posted a while back on the subject which was somehow, amazingly, ignored by the QCOM crowd>>
(from the NOK thread)
#reply-16070023
To:Nils Mork-Ulnes who started this subject
From: Mucho Maas Friday, Jul 13, 2001 5:04 AM
Respond to of 14619
interactive.wsj.com
It's impossible to know precisely how much money Qualcomm has made since the mid-1990s without a formal earnings restatement, which Qualcomm says is unnecessary under GAAP. But since the beginning of 1996, on a pro forma basis excluding unusual charges, Qualcomm reported pretax income of $2.02 billion, according to Multex. Including all unusual charges, its pretax income was $1.44 billion over the same period, making it nearly 30% less profitable.
Lynn Turner, the SEC's chief accountant, says the recent spate of write-offs of vendor-financed receivables raises troubling questions, though he declines to comment on specific companies. "I get very concerned when the accounting rules turn out an answer that just doesn't reflect the economics," Mr. Turner says.
but these are just simple facts, of course - you can make of them what you like. as for QCOM, of their 30% discounted 1.44BB of income since 1996, it might be an interesting exercise to determine what percentage of that money might have come from tax credits the company received when employees exercised stock options in the wake of 1999's massive share-price increase.
to the extent that tax credits were a contributor, your argument about QCOM importing massive profits loses weight. and in light of the losses of the other north american CDMA backers, it sure looks to me like the technology is a moneyloser. that is not to say CDMA isn't great or useful technology, but as history shows, there have been lots of great technologies--railroads, airplanes--that never made any money for their respective carriers and caused investors much heartache in the aggregate.
so, Maurice Winn, if you want to say nice things about QCOM, be my guest, but i really fail to see how it provides the macro benefits you allege, once you take all industry participants into account (as must be done when talking about the macro picture).
IMO, facts are why dollar is tanking now. americans got used to gobbling up 1 billion dollars a day to plug the current account deficit. in my humble opinion, if foreigners are now waking up to what has been done with their investments, the dollar will tank, assets will be pulled out of america and greenspan will be forced to start hiking rates by the end of the year. of course - this is exactly the process that has started during the past couple of weeks. |
