Continuity on Obama's Economic Team - NYTimes.com by David Leonhardt

2013-01-09

After President Obama took office in 2009, Jacob J. Lew became a deputy secretary of state within days. Gene Sperling was serving as an adviser to the Treasury secretary. Austan Goolsbee, a longtime Obama adviser, was serving on Mr. Obama's Council of Economic Advisers. Alan B. Krueger would become an assistant secretary of the Treasury within a few months.

In the last four years, all of these men have gone on to higher jobs within the Obama administration, and Mr. Lew is expected to be named Treasury secretary soon. Mr. Sperling is the top economic adviser inside the West Wing, while Mr. Krueger is the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Mr. Goolsbee preceded him at the council before returning to the University of Chicago.

As a picture on Wednesday's front page of The New York Times makes clear, Mr. Obama's economic team is made up almost entirely of people who have been with the administration from the very beginning. This approach has benefits, especially because many of the budget battles of the second term will be extensions of the battles of the first.

"We've got a weird negotiation - let's call it a multiyear negotiation," Mr. Goolsbee said this week on the Charlie Rose show. In 2011, the Obama administration and Congressional Republicans agreed to spending cuts with no new tax revenue, Mr. Goolsbee noted. Last month, the two sides agreed to new tax revenue with no spending cuts. In coming talks, the parties will discuss more of each, with Democrats pushing for more tax revenue and Republicans for more spending cuts.

"After a year and a half of negotiating, we may have a grand bargain; it's just not a grand bargain they actually struck all at once at the same table," Mr. Goolsbee added.

But if Mr. Obama's personnel strategy brings the benefit of consistency, it also has downsides. "Can it really be the case," Ezra Klein of The Washington Post asked, "that after four very difficult years, there is nothing the White House would gain in its second term by bringing in outsiders with fresh experience, different relationships and a new perspective?"

For more on Mr. Lew, currently the White House chief of staff, see this recent profile by Sheryl Gay Stolberg or this 2010 profile by Jackie Calmes. In May, Annie Lowrey noted that his name seemed logical to include in any list of potential nominees. A 2009 article by Eric Lipton described the significant salary Mr. Lew made while working at Citigroup.

In January, Noah Rosenberg noted that Mr. Lew, who grew up in Queens, continued to live in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. In 1999, when Mr. Lew was the Clinton administration's budget director, Tim Weiner dug into his New York roots.

Washington Jewish Week profiled Mr. Lew last year, describing him as a "'regular guy' who values the importance of friendship." National Journal described him this way: "Tall and thin, with Harry Potter-like glasses and salt-and-pepper hair, he looks like a typical Washington technocrat, an image that belies his talent for combat."

The Hill contrasted his speaking style with that of Rahm Emanuel, a former chief of staff. In 2001, The Washington Post noted Mr. Lew's long history as a budget negotiator, including in the 1980's debate over Social Security.

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Source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/09/continuity-on-obamas-economic-team/?pagewanted=print

Chinese Firm Buys an American Solar Technology Start-Up - NYTimes.com by Keith Bradsher

2013-01-09

Just a few years ago, Silicon Valley investors were pouring money into solar technologies and talking about how they would bring the same kind of innovation to green energy that they had to the computer chip.

But few anticipated that prices for silicon, the main component of traditional solar panels, would plummet or that Chinese manufacturers, backed by enormous subsidies from their government, would increase solar production capacity by a factor of 17 in just four years.

The resulting plunge in solar panel prices wiped out the dream of a new Solar Valley. Despite making advances in the new technology, known as thin-film solar, the American companies just couldn’t compete.

The federal government’s imposition of steep tariffs last year on Chinese conventional panels helped, but the industry had waited so late to apply for the tariffs that balance sheets had already been crippled with accumulated losses and investors had lost interest.

Some thin-film companies went bankrupt, including Solyndra, which had received half a billion dollars in federal subsidies. Others, like Stion, licensed their technology or formed strategic partnerships with large corporations.

On Wednesday, the chief executive of MiaSolé, one of the most promising Silicon Valley solar start-ups, appeared in Beijing for the announcement that Hanergy Holding Group of China had completed the purchase of his company and its technology for a fraction of what investors had put in. Hanergy made its money building hydroelectric dams.

Hanergy’s purchase of the 100-employee MiaSolé, based in Santa Clara, Calif., follows its acquisition in September of the 400-employee thin-film solar unit of Q.Cells, an insolvent German solar company. The two deals have allowed Hanergy to acquire at low cost an array of patents developed for hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital investments.

“Going head to head against the Asian low-cost, mass-volume crystalline silicon manufacturers is not a wise strategy if you’re trying to produce an ultracheap module in the United States or in high-cost markets,” said Neil Z. Auerbach, managing partner of Hudson Clean Energy Partners, a SoloPower investor. “But if you’re adopting advanced technology, you have a niche strategy in which those incumbents do not have a competitive edge because they don’t really have a product that suits.”

The industry’s broad competitive challenges have prompted American investors to shun the sector. Last year, venture capital financing in the solar sector plummeted nearly 50 percent to $992 million in 103 deals from $1.9 billion in 108 deals in 2011, according to Mercom Capital Group, a clean-tech research and communications company.

Chinese regulators, too, have begun trying to deal with the overcapacity, discouraging their banks from making more large loans to the solar panel sector.

Li Hejun, the chairman of Hanergy, said at the news conference in Beijing that the company’s hydroelectric dams produce several hundred million dollars a year in free cash flow, so it can finance its own investments in solar, which already include six thin-film solar factories, plus three more under construction.

“Everyone knows about the overcapacity in solar energy industry in China, but for us industrial insiders, this overcapacity is but a relative one,” he said. “For those who have technology, the situation is the opposite.”

The thin-film technology championed by the Silicon Valley start-ups uses more exotic materials than conventional solar panels, which are made from crystalline silicon.

Most thin-film modules are slightly less efficient at converting sunlight into electricity than conventional panels, but they are much lighter, which makes them easier to mount in locations that may not support the weight of conventional panels.

Supporters of thin-film technology contend that it has the potential for considerable further efficiency gains that may not be possible for conventional panels, which have been researched for decades. And some research has shown that thin-film can outperform conventional silicon-based panels at high temperatures, such as in deserts, where solar farms are often located.

The technology’s promise attracted the attention of the Obama administration, which provided clean-energy grants and loans to some of the companies, although not to MiaSolé.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/business/energy-environment/chinese-company-buys-2-solar-companies-from-west.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/People/B/Bradsher,%20Keith?ref=keithbradsher&pagewanted=print

樂做「大細路」 / 維基解碼 by 王維基

9 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT

　　好朋友說我太幼稚，年紀已不算輕，還這樣不成熟、放任。他說得對，一直以來，我仍認為自己是個「大細路」，亦很享受繼續當「大細路」的感覺。雖然我已經年過50，但每每遇上生意上的朋友，無論年紀比我大或比我少，我都總覺得自己是後輩。我一直都渴望能保留這點童真，不希望我過往30年在社會上打滾的經驗，無論是成功抑或失敗的過去，會抹掉我的童真。

 

　　我在想甚麼是成熟？首先是體諒。即使面對某些人不夠聰明，議價能力、學歷和職位都較低，但面對這些人時，成熟的人會以體諒的心對待。第二，依價值觀而行事，成熟的人不受利益引誘而忘記甚麼是對錯，不像小朋友「因一粒糖就跟拐子佬走」一樣。會把公眾利益放到最優先的位置，其次是公司；然後才是自身，排在最後的一定是錢。第三是深思熟慮，想到這點我真的承認我不太成熟。正如一些自認成熟的人責怪我不應挖角，應待發牌後才作出行動，那麼兩間電視台就不會如現在一樣大力反對。

 

　　無論我年紀多大，累積多少成熟的經歷，仍然希望能夠堅持，能夠做15歲的自己，繼續喜形於色，繼續敢說敢做。始終，童真總比成年人的假面具更珍貴。

 

轉載自晴報