U.S. love for Israel comes with a price

[P F Tinmore]

Wall Street Journal: Israeli Start-Ups Now, blah, blah, blah...

There are people developing stuff without Israel. Israel is not needed.

 

[JStone]

Wall Street Journal: Israeli Start-Ups Now, blah, blah, blah...

There are people developing stuff without Israel. Israel is not needed.

Bill Gates: Israel is by many measures the country, relative to its population, that's done the most to contribute to the technology revolution




[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHStBGk_D8Y]Israel Innovation - YouTube[/ame]

 

[P F Tinmore]

Bill Gates is in the US and has been developing software since the 1970s without the help of Israel.

 

[Douger]

Jew or Not Jew: Sergey Brin and Larry Page

 

[JStone]

Jew or Not Jew: Sergey Brin and Larry Page

If you and your fellow drunken irishmen ever stop boozing it up, your bankrupt and backward shithole ireland might be productive.

The Irish Republic's economy remains fragile and is likely to take years to recover,
BBC News - Irish economy remains fragile, warns Taoiseach Enda Kenny


Business Week: Israel Punches Above Weight As GDP Beats Developed World

Never mind the collapse in confidence in Europe...The Israeli economy just keeps growing faster than the rest of the developed world. The International Monetary Fund this week raised its forecast for the country and cut its estimate for the global economy on the impact of the European debt crisis. Israel's gross domestic product will expand 4.8 percent this year, according to the Washington-based lender. That's up from an April forecast of 3.8 percent and triple the pace for the average of the 34 advanced economies.


Citigroup Inc. said on Sept. 18 it would establish a new Israeli research center and Standard & Poor's a week earlier raised the country's credit rating. It cited the discovery of two gas fields off the coast of Israel that hold an estimated 25 trillion cubic feet of the fuel. Mellanox Technologies Ltd., the 12-year-old Israeli adapter maker part-owned by Oracle Corp., says sales will grow 80 percent in the third quarter. “The Israeli economy is very vibrant,” Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz said in a Sept. 20 interview with Bloomberg Television. “We enjoy very low unemployment and nice economic growth and this is mainly because we managed to develop very advanced high tech industries and very strong exports.”

Technology Capital: The stock market in Israel, whose population of 7.8 million is similar to Switzerland's, was upgraded to developed-market status by MSCI Inc. in May 2010, the same month the 63-year-old country was accepted into the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The country has about 60 companies traded on the Nasdaq Stock Market, the most of any nation outside North America after China and is also home to the largest number of startup companies per capita in the world. Israel ranks third in terms of projected growth this year among MSCI's list of 24 developed economies, after 6 percent for Hong Kong and 5.3 percent for Singapore, according to the IMF

Israel's exports are high-added value exports like informatics and technology,” said Jean-Dominique Butikofer, a fund manager who helps oversee about $1 billion of emerging- market debt at Union Bancaire Privee in Zurich, including quasi- sovereign Israeli bonds. “They're not exporting Gucci bags. If there's a slowdown, these are the kind of assets that are good to have.

Talent Pool: Venture-capital backed Israeli technology companies raised $364 million in the second quarter of this year, a 77 percent jump from the $206 million raised in the year-earlier period, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP Moneytree report. Seventy-six companies raised funding in the three-month period, compared with only 60 last year, the report said. “One reason that the economy continues to do well is the component of innovation and ability to adapt to a changing environment,” Citigroup Israel Managing Director Ralph Shaaya said in explaining the New York-based bank's decision to locate a research center in Israel. ‘There is a rich pool of talent in the high tech sector. The propensity for innovation is high.”

The economy may already be feeling the bite. Exports, excluding ships, aircrafts, and diamonds, declined for the fourth month out of five in August to their lowest since January, according to seasonally adjusted figures. This didn't deter Standard & Poor's from raising Israel's credit rating earlier this month to A+, its fifth-highest investment-grade rating, just a few weeks after cutting the U.S. and before cutting Italy. S&P cited the two gas fields, Tamar and Leviathan, off its Mediterranean coast. “You have a situation where the global economy is clearly running into a roadblock and having a tough time while the Israeli economy is going to bend but it isn't going to break,” said Daniel Hewitt, senior emerging-market economist at Barclays Capital in London. “We think Israel can maintain positive growth. Israel has a strong economy with a strong base.”

Israel Punches Above Weight as GDP Beats Developed World - BusinessWeek

 

[docmauser1]

We would have more security if we would dump Israel.

• Funny how hamas-hugging islamist-jihadist arabs convert into flag-kissing, tax-thumping "patriotic" americans once the subject of the day is Israel and jews.
• Arabs won't approve of the move.
• For laughs. Does it mean We would have more TSA if we would dump Israel.?

 

[JStone]

Quote: Originally Posted by P F Tinmore
We would have more security if we would dump Israel.

Dumbo, was Israel the reason the muslimes attacked US ships in the 18th century or is it just that you have the IQ of an amoeba?

Christopher Hitchens

...One cannot get around what [Thomas] Jefferson heard when he went with John Adams to wait upon Tripoli’s ambassador to London in March 1785. When they inquired by what right the Barbary states preyed upon American shipping, enslaving both crews and passengers, America’s two foremost envoys were informed that “it was written in the Koran, that all Nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon whoever they could find and to make Slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.” (It is worth noting that the United States played no part in the Crusades, or in the Catholic reconquista of Andalusia.)

Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates by Christopher Hitchens, City Journal Spring 2007

 

[Jos]

Israel. 34% of factories to move activity abroad

Thirty-four percent of Israel's industrial companies plan to move some of their production activity abroad within two years, according to a survey conducted by the Manufacturers Association of Israel among 235 factories.



The survey also shows that only half of Israel's production activity is expected to remain in the Jewish state after the planned transfer abroad. A quarter of the companies manufacturing abroad say they have received aid from the countries they moved their activity to.

34% of factories to move activity abroad - Israel Business, Ynetnews

 

[JStone]

Wall Street Journal: Where Tech Keeps Booming, In Israel, a Clustering of Talent, Research Universities and Venture Capital

"Google, Cisco, Microsoft, Intel, eBay . . . ," says one of eBay's executives. "The best-kept secret is that we all live and die by the work of our Israeli teams.

There are more new innovative ideas coming out of Israel than there are out in Silicon Valley right now. And it doesn't slow during economic downturns." The authors of "Start-Up Nation," Dan Senor and Saul Singer, are quoting an executive at British Telecom, but they could just as easily be quoting an executive at Intel, which last year opened a $3.5 billion factory in Kiryat Gat, an hour south of Tel Aviv, to make sophisticated 45-nanometer chips; or Warren Buffett, who in 2006 paid $4 billion for four-fifths of an Israeli firm that makes high-tech cutting tools for cars and planes; or John Chambers, Cisco's chief executive, who has bought nine Israeli start-ups; or Steve Ballmer, who calls Microsoft "as much an Israeli company as an American company" because of the importance of its Israeli technologists. "Google, Cisco, Microsoft, Intel, eBay . . . ," says one of eBay's executives. "The best-kept secret is that we all live and die by the work of our Israeli teams."

Israel is the world's techno-nation. Civilian research-and-development expenditures run 4.5% of the gross domestic product—half-again the level of the U.S., Germany or South Korea—and venture-capital investment per capita is 2½ times that of the U.S. and six times that of the United Kingdom. Even in absolute terms, Israel has only the U.S.—with more than 40 times the population—as a challenger.
Israel—a country of just 7.1 million people—attracted close to $2 billion in venture capital in 2008, as much as flowed to the U.K.'s 61 million citizens or the 145 million people living in Germany and France combined." At the start of 2009, some 63 Israeli companies were listed on the Nasdaq, more than those of any other foreign country. Among the Israeli firms: Teva Pharmaceuticals, the world's largest generic drug maker, with a market cap of $48 billion; and Check Point Software Technologies, with a market cap of $7 billion.
Book Review: "Start-Up Nation" - WSJ.com