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Governments Preparing To Bail Out DRAM Makers
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Dec 15, 2008 04:14 AM
from the bailing-buckets-the-new-best-conference-swag dept.
from the bailing-buckets-the-new-best-conference-swag dept.
An anonymous reader writes "DRAM makers are facing one of the worst downturns in their history and governments around the world are lining up to help companies through the mess. Taiwan, Germany and South Korea all appear poised to offer some assistance to their DRAM chip makers. The chip makers' problems are indicative of global woes. Easy lending terms and a bright view of the future prompted them to build too many new DRAM factories. Much of the new output was aimed at Microsoft's Windows Vista, which has higher memory requirements than XP."
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Submission: Governments preparing to bail out DRAM makers by Anonymous Coward
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Bailout Bandwagon (Score:5, Insightful)
Do government bail outs happen all the time, and its only recently that the term "bail out" has become popular? Or are all industries everywhere simultaneously going broke just now?
I don't follow the financial world much, so all of a sudden I see * industry bailouts over and over again... From an outsider's perspective, it kinda seems like a bandwagon
Where do I sign up to get bailed out of my personal company's (i.e. me) financial problems by the government?
Anyways, isn't bankruptcy supposed to be the "bail out," but with accountability instead of just writing large checks and calling it a successful bail out?
If anyone gets any government money, they ought to be held accountable for its use and for making sure that this situation never happens again.
I wish politicians, CEOs, and just the general public would start looking at the long term costs and benefits rather than focusing on immediate reward. Think of all the current worldwide problems we wouldn't have to worry about! Then again, thats much easier said than done...
Re:Bailout Bandwagon (Score:5, Informative)
are all industries everywhere simultaneously going broke just now?
You can get a pretty good idea how we got into this situation from here. [mises.org]
Not all industries are going broke, but economic activity in general is falling sharply. How long this lasts will depend on how much effort governments put into delaying and interfering with the repricing and deflation that must follow an inflationary bubble of this magnitude.
-jcr
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Re:Bailout Bandwagon (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Bailout Bandwagon (Score:5, Insightful)
the issue here is purely over speculation and a lack of a reality check in the financial sector. this has resulted in no more capital left for large projects, which has a down stream effect on everything.
as for the USA not being a super power anymore, your on drugs, their military can wipe the floor with anyone. i suspect this talk of over production is a cover for some other ideology you have...
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Re:Bailout Bandwagon (Score:5, Interesting)
Russia doesn't have the economic infrastructure or, these days, the world standing to be a real economic superpower. (They weren't much of an economic superpower during the Cold War, either, when compared to the United States.) And frankly, I don't think Europe has the steel in the spine to stand up to their threats (Russia, China-to-a-lesser-extent, Muslim immigration and the recent problems therewith, and even the United States) in any significant capacity.
China--there, you have something. But it's not going to be "divided across China, Europe, and Russia." If anyone "fights," it's going to be a fight between the United States and China, and the rest of the world, like it or not, are the chess pieces. But even then it's not going to be the drag-out fight, because it is mutually beneficial for China and the United States to stay very close trading partners. (For more on this, I suggest Tom Friedman's The World Is Flat--I don't agree with all his conclusions, but it's worthwhile for sure.)
Everybody owes the United States money and the United States owes everybody money. That means a U.S. recession will be a global problem for a very, very long time. Do you realize that China had something like 10% of GDP [npr.org] in Freddie Mac and Frannie Mae? Everybody's money is here.
I think you need to learn more about modern politics and economics before you make sweeping statements.
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Re:Bailout Bandwagon (Score:4, Insightful)
The real estate values has been inflated much by the ability to pay, which in turn is a result of the ability to get loans with low security.
Very few considers that the value of a property may have to be looked at for the long term, and not just short term.
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Re:Bailout Bandwagon (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with short term values is that not too many people in that position are actually being effected compared to all of the people who rode the wave for the right reasons.
The ability to pay however is the key to this. Energy costs had skyrocketed which greatly effected the ability to pay. Not only does it suck the disposable income from your pocket, there was a breaking point in which everything else from food to toilet paper started costing more because of it. There is nothing in the US or most modern countries that isn't effected by energy costs if not just to ship them to the store.
Unfortunately, energy costs are sort of a pet peeve of mine. There is a big push for alternative energy that simply doesn't compete with traditional sources in costs, efficient, and reliability, which will cause costs to increase again. Carbon taxes and use taxes based on carbon output seems to be in the future too, with both presidential candidates drinking so much cool aid this last election cycle and making sure the public knew about it, they are going to impose artificial limits to energy use and production in order to encourage the more expensive alternative energies. We have even seen certain party officials making statements that they want to raise gasoline taxes to bring the cost of fuel back up to $4.00 a gallon because it effected people's usage the most. For these reasons alone, it will be longer then two years before there is a recovery because now instead of adjusting and coming out of the problems, we will be adding back to them as soon as we start clearing them.
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Re:Bailout Bandwagon (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Bailout Bandwagon (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Bailout Bandwagon (Score:4, Informative)
This economic crisis is just a revaluation of how much the US is worth.
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Re:Bailout Bandwagon (Score:5, Insightful)
This "new socialism", where governments don't own the means of production outright, but rather have "partnerships" with private companies where the governments cover the risk and have a large degree of control (perhaps via an overseer, or "auto czar" in the case of car companies)... it looks suspiciously similar to the old fascism.
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Re:Bailout Bandwagon (Score:5, Interesting)
it's funny how Americans get all up in arms about true socialism that actually serves public interest, like socialized medicine/higher-education/sciences/internet access/etc., but you never hear a peep out of them about tax dollars being funneled into companies like Halliburton/KBR, GE, Carlyle Group, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, etc. that serves only the MIC. likewise, no one made a fuss about Harley Davidson receiving, essentially, a government bailout from the Reagan Administration in the form of overt protectionism during the 1980's while Reagan was simultaneously espousing the virtues of free market capitalism. and now we're outright giving government subsidies to the Big Three automakers to bail them out, and again there is practically no opposition to this either.
frankly, the recent corporate bailouts are more akin to Reaganomics than socialism. after all, nothing is being socialized. the Big Three automakers aren't being nationalized. American citizens aren't getting free cars or anything else out of this. it's just taking from the poor to give to the rich. that's been going on ever since monetary economies were created. today we're just corporate sharecroppers rather than feudal serfs.
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Re:Bailout Bandwagon (Score:5, Insightful)
I always thought the boom and bust was the market trying, not very well, to keep its balance.
You're half right according to Austrian economics (the kind pushed by Mises.org). The booms are caused by intervention in the market and the busts are the market's reaction to keep its balance. To overextend the drunk analogy, the forces that cause the loss of equilibrium would be whoever keeps giving the drunk more liquor. The Federal Reserve plays that role when it manipulates interest rates--the easy credit it offers is exactly like alcohol to a drunk. There's no way he will turn it down, and it will cause him to make poor decisions--in the most recent high-profile case, investing in building thousands of new houses that appear to be profitable due to artificially low credit interest rates rather than consumer interest. This is the boom portion of the cycle.
The bust comes when the drunk realizes that he has built way too many new homes and tries to salvage as much money as possible, causing the market to take a tumble. The same thing happened in the dot-com bubble, where microniche-market startups were inflated to ridiculous values because of loose credit policies. The same thing happened in the oil speculation bubble for the same reasons. So the boom part of the cycle is the abberation while the bust is a market correction. Each bubble has its individual facets, and in each case something different tipped the markets into bust mode, but the root cause of each is the monkeying-about of interest rates.
The problem with government bailouts is that we end up throwing more money at a problem caused by excessive amounts of money in the first place. Failure, while not good for the individuals involved, is necessary for a free market economy to work. If governments continue to bail out failing industries, the process will only be prolonged and, since many governments don't HAVE the money for these bailouts, new money is created which devalues all of the currency in circulation. There is a big advantage to being first in line for new money as the markets will not have adjusted to the inflated money supply yet, which gives ordinarily responsible bankers incentive to take as much credit as they can get. Early birds get more bang for their buck while we Joe Schmoes see only costs rising faster than our pay rates.
I'm getting off-track because it's a big, interrelated tangle that can only be solved by cutting the worm out of the root: getting rid of, or at least heavily restricting, the Federal Reserve and other central banks. I'm also pretty new to this stuff, so hopefully a more seasoned scholar of Austrian economics can correct the mistakes I may have made here. For an in-depth analysis of the boom/bust cycle, check out Economic Depressions: Their Cause and Cure [mises.org] on the Mises.org site. It's lengthy, so if you want to get right to the meat, start at this sentence:
Fortunately, a correct theory of depression and of the business cycle does exist, even though it is universally neglected in present-day economics.
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Re:Bailout Bandwagon (Score:5, Informative)
I hardly expect anyone to read that, so I'll summarize. In 1979, according to this article, the Carter administration offered 1.5 billion dollars to Chrysler in what was referred to as a bailout (also called, somewhat quaintly, a "tide-me-over"). Amazingly, the company was proposing a shift to fuel-efficient cars that would get them back to profitability "by 1981". This is all before my time, but I do know that if they ever followed that business model it can't have lasted very long. And so we find them today, stuck in the same ditch they'd driven into back in 1979.
We've all heard that history repeats itself, but this is one of the most startlingly clear examples that I've seen. The difference today, as far as I can tell, is that in 1979 the bailout package called for Chrysler to have a clear plan going forward, and laid out strict conditions (I won't cite them here, but feel free to click on that big ol' link up there). By contrast, I've seen snippets of the recent hearings on a present-day auto-industry bailout. Irrelevant grandstanding about jets [bbc.co.uk] aside, these execs manifestly do not have any plan, and have admitted that they really don't know if the bailout will be enough to save the industry.
We should not stand for this. The whole tired show has been seen before. The only difference, again, between the bailouts of today and those of yesteryear is that we no longer ask for any sort of accountability. That, and a couple orders of magnitude.
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Re:Bailout Bandwagon (Score:5, Insightful)
Chrysler did make fuel-efficient cars upto 1995 (like the 30mpg Dodge Shadow and 35mpg Neon), but outward pressure from Americans forced them to start making gas-guzzling Bricks known as SUVs.
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Re:Bailout Bandwagon (Score:5, Insightful)
Your assessment sounds a lot like the idea that a doctor saved a person's life is a 'shallow analysis', because the patient spent the next three decades smoking and eventually died of lung disease.
A better example of shallow analysis comes from people who simply jump to the conclusion that government intervention always turns out badly.
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Re:Bailout Bandwagon (Score:4, Interesting)
- The jackholes we might give money to have NO plan this time and they make no guarantees.
- There will be very little oversight
- We'll have to bail 'em out again in another 30 years, and we KNOW this, because they were in the exact same situation 30 years ago (or at least Chrysler was).
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Re:Bailout Bandwagon (Score:4, Interesting)
No, the shallowness I refer to is looking only at the effect on chrysler, while ignoring the effects of the misdirection of capital to Chrysler instead of to other people and businesses.
A better example of shallow analysis comes from people who simply jump to the conclusion that government intervention always turns out badly.
Show me an example of a government intervention in the economy which turned out well. You might want to read up on the Broken Window Fallacy first.
-jcr
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Re:Bailout Bandwagon (Score:5, Insightful)
Show me an example of a government intervention in the economy which turned out well.
Is your benchmark for "turned out well" the most efficient allocation of money, or not having people dying of starvation because they can't afford to buy food ?
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Re:Bailout Bandwagon (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem comes with the concept of "too big to fail" due to concentration. In the general case, you are quite right, If you have a hundred bakers, and there is not enough demand for bread to keep them all in business, the least efficient ones go bankrupt and the more efficient ones thrive, thus increasing the general efficiency of the baking business.
The problem is when you have monolithic industries, or quasi monolithic industries, where the whole industry for one region sinks together. If you have one mega-bakery and that is badly run, you cannot let it go bust because there will be no bread and people will starve.
The DRAM industry has become increasingly capital intensive: a new Fab costs billions, but produces vast numbers of chips. This means that there are very few fabs in one country, probably only one. Healthy shrinkage, by a few percent, is not possible: you lose 50% of your industry or none. And, politically, that is unacceptable for any single country. Worldwide, it would be correct to close down one or two DRAM fabs at the moment. A World Government, with perhaps 12 fabs, could look at the big picture. But Taiwan, Germany, and South Korea, with two or three each, cannot accept losing such a large slice of their industry.
The same was true in the finance industry: because of their size, AIG, Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac were "too big to fail". Lehmann was adjudge not to be too big - but the repercussions of its failure are turning out much larger than expected.
The same is true in cars. "Detroit", the Big Three American car manufacturers, is collectively "too big to fail". And they are so interlocked in the public mind that they would appear to sink or swim together. Mind you, their problems are basically the result of baling out Chrysler twice instead of letting it fail at a time when it could have failed on its own and brought the appropriate slimming down to Detroit.
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Re:Bailout Bandwagon (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Bailout Bandwagon (Score:5, Insightful)
One problem with this is to define a market. All vehicles, or just passenger cars, or just "traditional American gas guzzlers". All aircraft, or only 400+ seat aircraft (i.e. Boeing's thirty year monopoly with the 747)? If you introduce a brand new product (the microprocessor, USB sticks, commercial orbital launchers, a new drug) then by definition you own 100% of the market the day you sell your first product. Windows has 90% of the market for desktop OSes. Would it do any good to split MS up into four different suppliers of the identical code? Or to have four diverging implementations of Windows because the four companies would be prevented from co-operating by anti-trust laws. Splitting off, say, Office wouldn't reduce the OS competition.
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What happened to "risks of doing business"? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not just the financial institutions - now it's the car companies (stalled for the moment), airlines - and foreign businesses are lining up for a handout now too.
Why bother with improved products or competitive pricing? Let's just build a factory, make some overpriced junk, then have the government give us a bunch of money? Seems like this is the new gold rush...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm all for fair and equal, free market economics, but if it looks like a whole industry is going down, not just a single company, fair and equal bailouts are the right thing to do. If any one industry fails, it could cause a chain reaction that stalls virtually all production and maintenance, and things degenerate into the stone age or at least third world.
Without RAM we don't have new computers, without new computers we can't even sustain the infrastructure we have, let alone grow it to keep up with new d
Re:What happened to "risks of doing business"? (Score:4, Interesting)
If RAM is so crucially important, why are all the RAM makers having such a hard time? I can't see there'd be no demand for RAM for any significant (or even insignificant) period of time, since as you say it's an integral component of crucial infrastructure all over the world.
Perhaps there actually is too much competition (i.e. more suppliers than the market can really sustain) and they're having to sell their product at prices which are unrealistic in the long term? One of the necessary side-effects of a highly competitive market is that there's lots of failures, after all. Especially if you consider the high price of setting up a factory, having a business plan that requires you to sell loads of RAM with tiny profit margins for the next few decades in order to break even is probably not a sound strategy.
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Re:What happened to "risks of doing business"? (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that there is currently too much capacity so one or more of the DRAM plants should close ...but which ones, each country has the attitude "not the one in my country" since they quite rightly assume that the survivors will be profitable and when economic times improve the countries without a DRAM plant won't get one in the short term
DRAM plants are very costly to build and take a long time to get going but are very profitable when working near capacity ... the problem is there are currently too many and so all are working under capacity and so are losing money ..
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Re:What happened to "risks of doing business"? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not like there is no demand for RAM at all.
The DRAM companies would not cease to exist, as people will still want to buy RAM.
If a company fails, they usually sell their facilities to try and recover some of their debt..
Someone would buy some of the fabs since there's still a lot of money to be made... hence, you get a smaller company doing the same thing.
not a chain reaction that destroys all markets.
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Re:What happened to "risks of doing business"? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a little more complex than that. You're right as you say, the companies asking for bailouts wouldn't completely collapse, they'd sell off some of their factories that's true.
But not all their factories would get bought up- the whole point is there's overproduction for the market's current demands so a small company isn't going to have anymore demand for their extra supply than the big company did for it's oversupply. Essentially, whatever happens, jobs are going to be lost to cut company costs, and there's the problem.
As jobs are lost because of this sort of thing, there are a greater number of unemployed no longer available to buy products such as DRAM or whatever and so demand falls further, this has the inevitable result of further redundancies and the cycle continuous.
So, particularly in the case of the US car manufacturers where so many people have the potential to lose there jobs there could indeed be an absolutely massive impact. I don't generally subscribe to doomsday scenarios so I don't think we'll see complete melt down, at the end of the day, the guys at the top will fiddle the system and magically conjure up some more money from their magical money device as usual. If things were left to run their natural course though, then there certainly is the theoretical possibility that everything could indeed go down the drain as collapse leads to collapse.
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Re:What happened to "risks of doing business"? (Score:4, Interesting)
Everyone is special and deserves a gold star.
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Re:What happened to "risks of doing business"? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm no expert on this but my understanding is that they then realised it was just the first of many. It then looked like if there was no intervention, most of the banking industry would fall apart. Sure, Lloyds TSB might have been ok plus a few smaller ones but it would've taken out the savings and current accounts of millions of people, plus destroyed a lot of infrastructure, making it difficult for the survivors to take up the slack as would be ideal.
In the meantime, very many cashpoints would stop working and therefore many people would be unable to get cash or use their cards in order to buy food. BANG! Society falls apart.
If this is anything like the UK banking sector, you may be greatly underestimating the danger that the memory chip business is in!
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Bail Out Madness (Score:3, Insightful)
Now I understand bailing out banks via FIDC, but now we're bailing out investment banks too, and now of all things DRAM Makers? Because they overmanufactured? There comes a time to let nature take its course and let more efficient *smarter* companies rise from the ashes. Why are we propping up dinosaurs? With taxpayer dollars at that?
perpetual growth is a falacy (Score:3, Insightful)
Economists have no mathamatics training.
They think the world is an infinite size with zero stoppage.
Try growing 1000 fish in a small fish tank, eventually it will get so crowded, that 90% die.
I think that 2B bailout wasnt free cash, it was just no questions asked loans, which the banks wont do anymore. Hello banks, you can keep all the billions in cash, but its useless if you cannot spend it, or loan it.
But no amount of free cash or 0% loans will save the economy. Its unsavable, it has to crash/reboot/refor
Re:Bail Out Madness (Score:5, Informative)
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been about 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: '>From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.
Alexander Fraser Tytler (1747-1813)
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Re:Bail Out Madness (Score:5, Insightful)
"The budget should be balanced, the treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance."
-- Marcus Cicero, circa 50BC.
Some things never change.
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Bad news for Micron? (Score:5, Insightful)
As the only remaining DRAM manufacturer in the US, what does this mean for Micron? How will they be able to compete if the overseas companies get bailed out?
Blowing my mind (Score:4, Funny)
So you're telling me Vista is actually good for something, stimulating an industry?
If it doesn't work, stop trying to fix it (Score:5, Insightful)
Weren't DRAM manufacturers just involved in a huge price fixing scheme? Oh yeah, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing [wikipedia.org].
So the industry that flouts the law is now requesting artificial support to help them through hard times? What's the real impact if these companies fail? Their assets get sold at a discount, their creditors take a loss, and the world moves on. The technology doesn't disappear. The knowledge of their employees doesn't evaporate. If the business can't survive without manipulating the market or government support, it doesn't deserve to exist.
If DRAM is a valuable technology, somebody, somewhere, can run a business doing it. If that's not possible, then stop doing it.
Maybe everyone should just name a new industry and then mandate that people give them money. That would be so much easier, than say, actually creating value.
Re:What about bailing out people? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bail out people, not businesses.
No.
Robbing Peter to pay Paul is wrong, whether Paul is a corporation or an individual.
-jcr
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What about bailing out people? (Score:5, Insightful)
Corporations should never get the money,
Up to this point, you're correct.
people should. ..and here's where you go wrong.
There is no action that is immoral for an individual, that becomes right when done by a collective. If I take losses in the stock market, I have no right to rob you to make up what I lost. It doesn't become right if I employ a gang of thugs to rob you. It doesn't become right if I have the government do it for me.
-jcr
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Re:What about bailing out people? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:What about bailing out people? (Score:5, Insightful)
Moral imperatives are a function of the social system, there are no absolutes.
If you believe that, then I certainly don't want you for a neighbor.
robbing corporations to benefit the people (for example) can easily be justified within the system
Rationalization and justification aren't the same thing.
-jcr
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Re:What about bailing out people? (Score:5, Insightful)
Luckily, where I can or cannot live is not up to you, so your concern is unnecessary, thank you :)
True. Justification means proving legality within a system of laws, which is exactly what I'm claiming in this instance. However, your ideological preconceptions about right and wrong have clearly caused you to rationalize an absolute opposition to government bailouts, regardless of the circumstances.
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Re:What about bailing out people? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not justified in any case.
Besides failing morally, it also fails from a utilitarian standpoint. When a company fails, the market has shown that people don't want that organization to persist. Keeping it alive misallocates capital that can be better used elsewhere.
-jcr
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Re:What about bailing out people? (Score:5, Informative)
The usual quote "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" naturally applies. However, don't forget that intervention *is* the purpose of government. It is the official mechanism for imposing the will of the people, whatever that will happens to be.
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Re:What about bailing out people? (Score:5, Insightful)
That is a really scary sentence and one that I don't think you've thought through. The purpose of the government is to enforce the laws not to impose the 'will of the people' willy nilly. That shifts like the wind and is often counter to what needs to be done, should be done and is right to do. There is such a thing as tyranny of the masses.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What about bailing out people? (Score:4, Insightful)
Libertarian philosophy does not justify itself.
Freedom doesn't require justification. If you want to use force to impose your will on someone else, the burden of proof for the necessity of doing so lies with you.
-jcr
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Re:What about bailing out people? (Score:4, Insightful)
You have that exactly backwards. Nobody abuses the weak more than governments, and government is the ultimate monopoly. The more power you cede to government (to save you from the scary rich people!) the less freedom you will have.
-jcr
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Re:What about bailing out people? (Score:4, Informative)
Without regulation people are free to abuse others however the hell they feel like
Try to grasp the difference between the rule of law, and the government intervening to reward some people at other people's expense. The former is what we create governments for, to secure our freedom. The latter is how governments destroy freedom.
-jcr
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