This said Ferdinand Dudenhöffer of the University Duisburg-Essen. German government has prepared subsidy package worth €500 millions to make things happen. Instead 10 times is needed to catch up with development in foreign countries, particularly in China. He projected that only 6,200.000 cars are going to be rolling in 2010 worldwide. All battery or hybrid driven vehicles, It is mistaken assumption that by the year 2025 the barrel of oil would cost $350, and electric car would cost less than $40,000 in 2011. In fact a battery driven Nissan Leaf already cost around $33,000 in 2009. He points out that still in 2009, there were only 1588 electric cars running in Germany. The very ambitious plan for 600,000 Plug-in Hybrid is "grossly overambitious". He points out that:
R&D efforts are to be strongly increased especially as comparing to that of States and China
Germany needs a beaker/watch tower type of projects that give direction to industrial ventures, not small mostly "pedestrian" research piece meal efforts.
Urban centers must prepare themselves for making traffic organization more friendly to the electro car. e-cars should allowed to use bus lines in rush hour.
Making car batteries more efficient, and regenerating, manufacturing such batteries would bring additional employment of 100,000 new jobs.
Companies like Bosch, Evonik, SB-LiMotive or Merck invest heavily in such technologies. However Dudenhöffer is not advising to buy e-car any time soon. He warns for so called "write-off premium" on such cars, and this is another down side of the e-car, its depreciation is much more rapid than a classic vehicle.
2010/07/26
ICHEP 2010 conference highlights first results from the LHC
Geneva, 26 July 2010. First results from the LHC at CERN* are being revealed at ICHEP, the world’s largest international conference on particle physics, which has attracted more than 1000 participants to its venue in Paris. The spokespersons of the four major experiments at the LHC – ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb – are today presenting measurements from the first three months of successful LHC operation at 3.5 TeV per beam, an energy three and a half times higher than previously achieved at a particle accelerator.
With these first measurements the experiments are rediscovering the particles that lie at the heart of the Standard Model – the package that contains current understanding of the particles of matter and the forces that act between them. This is an essential step before moving on to make discoveries. Among the billions of collisions already recorded are some that contain 'candidates' for the top quark, for the first time at a European laboratory.
“Rediscovering our ‘old friends’ in the particle world shows that the LHC experiments are well prepared to enter new territory” said CERN’s Director-General Rolf Heuer. “It seems that the Standard Model is working as expected. Now it is down to nature to show us what is new.”
The quality of the results presented at ICHEP bears witness both to the excellent performance of the LHC and to the high quality of the data in the experiments. The LHC, which is still in its early days, is making steady progress towards its ultimate operating conditions. The luminosity – a measure of the collision rate - has already risen by a factor of more than a thousand since the end of March. This rapid progress with commissioning the LHC beam has been matched by the speed with which the data on billions of collisions have been processed by the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, which allows data from the experiments to be analysed at collaborating centres around the world.
“Within days we were finding Ws, and later Zs – the two carriers of the weak force discovered here at CERN nearly 30 years ago,” said Fabiola Gianotti, spokesperson for the 3000-strong ATLAS collaboration. “Thanks to the efforts of the whole collaboration, in particular the young scientists, everything from data-taking at the detector, through calibration, data processing and distribution, to the physics analysis, has worked fast and efficiently.”
“It is amazing to see how quickly we have ‘re-discovered’ the known particles: from the lightest resonances up to the massive top quark. What we have shown here in Paris is just the first outcome of an intense campaign of accurate measurements of their properties.” said Guido Tonelli, spokesperson for CMS. “This patient and systematic work is needed to establish the known background to any new signal.”
“The LHCb experiment is tailor-made to study the family of b particles, containing beauty quarks,” said the experiment’s spokesperson Andrei Golutvin, “So it’s extremely gratifying that we are already finding hundreds of examples of these particles, clearly pin-pointed through the analysis of many particle tracks.”
“The current running with proton collisions has allowed us to connect with results from other experiments at lower energies, test and improve the extrapolations made for the LHC, and prepare the ground for the heavy-ion runs,” said Jurgen Schukraft, spokesperson for the ALICE collaboration. This experiment is optimized to study collisions of lead ions, which will occur in the LHC for the first time later this year.
Two further experiments have also already benefited from the first months of LHC operation at 3.5 TeV per beam. LHCf, which is studying the production of neutral particles in proton-proton collisions to help in understanding cosmic-ray interactions in the Earth’s atmosphere, has already collected the data it needs at a beam energy of 3.5 TeV. TOTEM, which has to move close to the beams for its in-depth studies of the proton, is beginning to make its first measurements.
CERN will run the LHC for 18-24 months with the objective of delivering enough data to the experiments to make significant advances across a wide range of physics processes. With the amount of data expected, referred to as one inverse femtobarn, the experiments should be well placed to make inroads in to new territory, with the possibility of significant discoveries.
Photos :
http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2010/PR15.10E.html
Contact :
CERN Press Office, press.office@cern.ch
With these first measurements the experiments are rediscovering the particles that lie at the heart of the Standard Model – the package that contains current understanding of the particles of matter and the forces that act between them. This is an essential step before moving on to make discoveries. Among the billions of collisions already recorded are some that contain 'candidates' for the top quark, for the first time at a European laboratory.
“Rediscovering our ‘old friends’ in the particle world shows that the LHC experiments are well prepared to enter new territory” said CERN’s Director-General Rolf Heuer. “It seems that the Standard Model is working as expected. Now it is down to nature to show us what is new.”
The quality of the results presented at ICHEP bears witness both to the excellent performance of the LHC and to the high quality of the data in the experiments. The LHC, which is still in its early days, is making steady progress towards its ultimate operating conditions. The luminosity – a measure of the collision rate - has already risen by a factor of more than a thousand since the end of March. This rapid progress with commissioning the LHC beam has been matched by the speed with which the data on billions of collisions have been processed by the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, which allows data from the experiments to be analysed at collaborating centres around the world.
“Within days we were finding Ws, and later Zs – the two carriers of the weak force discovered here at CERN nearly 30 years ago,” said Fabiola Gianotti, spokesperson for the 3000-strong ATLAS collaboration. “Thanks to the efforts of the whole collaboration, in particular the young scientists, everything from data-taking at the detector, through calibration, data processing and distribution, to the physics analysis, has worked fast and efficiently.”
“It is amazing to see how quickly we have ‘re-discovered’ the known particles: from the lightest resonances up to the massive top quark. What we have shown here in Paris is just the first outcome of an intense campaign of accurate measurements of their properties.” said Guido Tonelli, spokesperson for CMS. “This patient and systematic work is needed to establish the known background to any new signal.”
“The LHCb experiment is tailor-made to study the family of b particles, containing beauty quarks,” said the experiment’s spokesperson Andrei Golutvin, “So it’s extremely gratifying that we are already finding hundreds of examples of these particles, clearly pin-pointed through the analysis of many particle tracks.”
“The current running with proton collisions has allowed us to connect with results from other experiments at lower energies, test and improve the extrapolations made for the LHC, and prepare the ground for the heavy-ion runs,” said Jurgen Schukraft, spokesperson for the ALICE collaboration. This experiment is optimized to study collisions of lead ions, which will occur in the LHC for the first time later this year.
Two further experiments have also already benefited from the first months of LHC operation at 3.5 TeV per beam. LHCf, which is studying the production of neutral particles in proton-proton collisions to help in understanding cosmic-ray interactions in the Earth’s atmosphere, has already collected the data it needs at a beam energy of 3.5 TeV. TOTEM, which has to move close to the beams for its in-depth studies of the proton, is beginning to make its first measurements.
CERN will run the LHC for 18-24 months with the objective of delivering enough data to the experiments to make significant advances across a wide range of physics processes. With the amount of data expected, referred to as one inverse femtobarn, the experiments should be well placed to make inroads in to new territory, with the possibility of significant discoveries.
Photos :
http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2010/PR15.10E.html
Contact :
CERN Press Office, press.office@cern.ch
2010/07/23
Boards and Solutions Conference in Munich
ICC Media has organized a one day conference dedicated to
-Industrial Automation
-Medical
-Transportation
Technology sessions on open standards (VME/VPX, cPCI and xTCA as it is called now) and Small form factor boards (COMe, Q7, Core express, etc)
Main sponsors from Congatech, Eurotech, Kontron, Lippert and Schroff. The show has definitely regional character restricting itself to southern part of Germany, but mostly from Bavaria.
From program point of view discussions addresses basic issues and gave actual applications which alleviated the issues of applicability, new improvements, even very minute ones like a connector from Harting or a single fastener from Schroff. Good organization throughout, but heat has spoilt some of the fun, and some people stayed in the shade most likely. That is what I hear from by asking why someone missed the show.
-Industrial Automation
-Medical
-Transportation
Technology sessions on open standards (VME/VPX, cPCI and xTCA as it is called now) and Small form factor boards (COMe, Q7, Core express, etc)
Main sponsors from Congatech, Eurotech, Kontron, Lippert and Schroff. The show has definitely regional character restricting itself to southern part of Germany, but mostly from Bavaria.
From program point of view discussions addresses basic issues and gave actual applications which alleviated the issues of applicability, new improvements, even very minute ones like a connector from Harting or a single fastener from Schroff. Good organization throughout, but heat has spoilt some of the fun, and some people stayed in the shade most likely. That is what I hear from by asking why someone missed the show.
2010/07/22
Sitting in a traffic jam in front of Gottardo tunnel
Gottardo Tunnel is Europe's most critical transport installation, with traffic passing at the rate of 40,000 vehicles per day. It is 17 km long, two tubes, but only one is traffic ready, the second is a rescue and evacuation tube, smaller in size, with connection to the main tube every 250 m. These connections are allowing for evacuation of passengers into a separately ventilated area from which they can walk out of the tunnel at each end.
It is well ventilated, well lit, and with ample signage for drivers. Traffic information is being fed into each vehicle radio system allowing drivers to follow police instructions. Its is a huge investment, and well run business too. This business is not free, each passing car has to purchase a CHF 40 sticker, which when is placed on the windshield allows a car to ride through Swiss highways for the period of 13 month (a calendar year plus next January). As the great majority of passing vehicles are non-swiss, thus extra francs flow into Swiss highway coffers. As for exactly the same reasons that majority of vehicles are coming from EU, hence the Swiss demand large compensations for the tunnel and highway upkeep. I was told that such subsidy reaches close to a billion € per year. Thus there is huge stake in traffic controlling such flow of funds, huge stake.
I am passing through the tunnel twice each month, North to South and back. Since I select the day and time of the passage, usually I am lucky to see the traffic jam on the opposing side of the highway. I avoid weekends naturally. Doing this ride for over 10 years quite regularly I have noticed certain patterns and formed some opinions.
Newspapers report periodically on Environmental rallies, protests organized by colorful bunch of outfits including local communities genuinely concerned with children exposure to the exhaust fumes, of vehicles idle in traffic jams at the entry points to the tunnel. Traffic jams that stretch for several kilometers each tunnels end. In addition, lorries are being sorted out all along the highway stretch from Basel to Chiasso on the Italian border. Lorries are obliged to exit highway at designated parking lots, where they undergo papers check, technical inspection and other possible harassment from the authorities. Try to spot a Swiss lorry in the lot, never, they seem to be oblivious to such orderly procedures. Each stop takes many hours of lining up into the parking lot, going through the motions there, then leaving and driving off the highways at the next point. A trip that normally takes 5 hours with good lunch at Airolo's restaurant, grows to 24hrs or longer. It increases time thus costs of transportation. That is why in Switzerland lorry transport is best to buy from local shipping companies. No competition from larger markets like Germany, France or Italy. Their costs are clearly higher due to the very procedures. Besides basic expenses there is a weekend ban on lorry driving from Friday 10PM till Monday morning. If your driver get caught up, you will add 48 hours to your scheduled trip for Switzerland only. That is on top of cost of Gottardo.
Standing in front of the tunnel for hours takes you doing things you normally would never do. Like taking time of traffic lights controlling 2 line entry to the tunnel. There are 2 traffic lights at each end, one for each line. The sequence runs more or less like this: cars and lorries revving during red light phase. It takes from 30 seconds up to over 1,5 minutes for red to change. All depending on traffic situation, and the desire of causing a traffic jam, by the operator. The phase changes to green, and then both line flash green at the same time. It takes from 15 seconds to 1 minute, again the same reasons. No wonder that traffic piles up quickly, showing everyone that there is “ a Gottardo tunnel traffic problem”. With ratio 2 to one against the green, the till clings in Brussels but for the Swiss.
The tunnel itself needs constant maintenance, and it would require a fundamental refurbishing by 2020, when it would close for 2 years. By the time the railways tunnel (54 km) long is going to (presumably) be taking all the traffic on rails. This is going to be welcomed by the locals, who do not see a pollution from power generating stations. By the time, I am going to be happily back in Canada, enjoying fishing and good cuisine, rather than standing in traffic jams cooked up by the transportation officials hungry of subsidies and the local police.
Whichever way you want to look at it, its is all man made.
It is well ventilated, well lit, and with ample signage for drivers. Traffic information is being fed into each vehicle radio system allowing drivers to follow police instructions. Its is a huge investment, and well run business too. This business is not free, each passing car has to purchase a CHF 40 sticker, which when is placed on the windshield allows a car to ride through Swiss highways for the period of 13 month (a calendar year plus next January). As the great majority of passing vehicles are non-swiss, thus extra francs flow into Swiss highway coffers. As for exactly the same reasons that majority of vehicles are coming from EU, hence the Swiss demand large compensations for the tunnel and highway upkeep. I was told that such subsidy reaches close to a billion € per year. Thus there is huge stake in traffic controlling such flow of funds, huge stake.
I am passing through the tunnel twice each month, North to South and back. Since I select the day and time of the passage, usually I am lucky to see the traffic jam on the opposing side of the highway. I avoid weekends naturally. Doing this ride for over 10 years quite regularly I have noticed certain patterns and formed some opinions.
Newspapers report periodically on Environmental rallies, protests organized by colorful bunch of outfits including local communities genuinely concerned with children exposure to the exhaust fumes, of vehicles idle in traffic jams at the entry points to the tunnel. Traffic jams that stretch for several kilometers each tunnels end. In addition, lorries are being sorted out all along the highway stretch from Basel to Chiasso on the Italian border. Lorries are obliged to exit highway at designated parking lots, where they undergo papers check, technical inspection and other possible harassment from the authorities. Try to spot a Swiss lorry in the lot, never, they seem to be oblivious to such orderly procedures. Each stop takes many hours of lining up into the parking lot, going through the motions there, then leaving and driving off the highways at the next point. A trip that normally takes 5 hours with good lunch at Airolo's restaurant, grows to 24hrs or longer. It increases time thus costs of transportation. That is why in Switzerland lorry transport is best to buy from local shipping companies. No competition from larger markets like Germany, France or Italy. Their costs are clearly higher due to the very procedures. Besides basic expenses there is a weekend ban on lorry driving from Friday 10PM till Monday morning. If your driver get caught up, you will add 48 hours to your scheduled trip for Switzerland only. That is on top of cost of Gottardo.
Standing in front of the tunnel for hours takes you doing things you normally would never do. Like taking time of traffic lights controlling 2 line entry to the tunnel. There are 2 traffic lights at each end, one for each line. The sequence runs more or less like this: cars and lorries revving during red light phase. It takes from 30 seconds up to over 1,5 minutes for red to change. All depending on traffic situation, and the desire of causing a traffic jam, by the operator. The phase changes to green, and then both line flash green at the same time. It takes from 15 seconds to 1 minute, again the same reasons. No wonder that traffic piles up quickly, showing everyone that there is “ a Gottardo tunnel traffic problem”. With ratio 2 to one against the green, the till clings in Brussels but for the Swiss.
The tunnel itself needs constant maintenance, and it would require a fundamental refurbishing by 2020, when it would close for 2 years. By the time the railways tunnel (54 km) long is going to (presumably) be taking all the traffic on rails. This is going to be welcomed by the locals, who do not see a pollution from power generating stations. By the time, I am going to be happily back in Canada, enjoying fishing and good cuisine, rather than standing in traffic jams cooked up by the transportation officials hungry of subsidies and the local police.
Whichever way you want to look at it, its is all man made.
2010/07/21
AMD is re-entering Embedded Markets
After establishing itself as a vendor to Telecommunications, in view of several bold moves by Intel with Atom for embedded applications, it did look like AMD would be left out for industrial applications. Not so says Peter Hoser from Fujitsu Technology Solutions. Its new Mini-ITX boards feature ASB 1 and 2 and the high performance AM3. As it looks like the Fujitsu is the exclusive channel assigned to the role of boards vendor. Fujitsu is going to market its products to two biggest boards markets in EMEA and North America. Looks like Intel has still a competitor to battle. After all if i had no competitors around I would most likely be in the wrong business.
2010/07/16
Cars use more and more MEMS sensors, good news for industry
Recent indicators given out by several industry monitors, confirm the solid growth in automotive applications, like acceleration, pressure, shock, vibration, and other sensitive applications. iSuppli quotes 18% growth as opposing to the year 2009, and even rose above the record year of 2007. 40% will be delivered in North America, around 1/3 in Europe the rest mostly in Asia.
At the same time bottleneck situation continues in the IC area in general and also in capacitors.
As mentioned in this blog earlier, lead times continue to grow longer.
At the same time bottleneck situation continues in the IC area in general and also in capacitors.
As mentioned in this blog earlier, lead times continue to grow longer.
2010/07/13
Automatica 2010, the show goes on with more pep than before
This years edition of Automatica was astounding success. It may tell us a positive story we all badly need and longing to read in the Embedded Industry as well as in others. In comparing to the year 2008, this years edition was bigger and better. Visitors jumped to some 32000, not quite on the par with 2008 admitting organizers, but we expected only 30000 this year (?). However foreign visitors came in droves (34% as opposing to 26% 2 years before), Exhibitors were 708 as opposing to 868 2 years ago.
The organizers tried to prove badly that the crisis is over and we are back to business.
Not quite so sees the writer. It is plain to all who attended the press conference: Exhibitors are still reluctant to invest marketing activities, expecting (justly) fewer visitors from home markets. And they were right, fewer visitors from Germany made the foreign component larger in entire visitors account.
The so called "positive Bilanz" is still going to be waiting until 2012 the next edition of this still interesting event. That is not what organizers wanted to say.
Munich exhibitor area is an excellent facility, well connected, hotels, restaurants, etc, for several venues, however, the trend is to move out to Nuremberg (SMS/Drives) and those which stay tend to morph into a regional rather than national shows. Productronica and Electronica comes to mind, or even close like the Systems have done. I remember that sometimes at Systems there we all 12 pavilions, full of exhibitors, where now 5-6 are taken at the most. It may be some trend here but if so the crisis started way before the 2008 when Lehman Brothers bank collapsed in September.
The organizers tried to prove badly that the crisis is over and we are back to business.
Not quite so sees the writer. It is plain to all who attended the press conference: Exhibitors are still reluctant to invest marketing activities, expecting (justly) fewer visitors from home markets. And they were right, fewer visitors from Germany made the foreign component larger in entire visitors account.
The so called "positive Bilanz" is still going to be waiting until 2012 the next edition of this still interesting event. That is not what organizers wanted to say.
Munich exhibitor area is an excellent facility, well connected, hotels, restaurants, etc, for several venues, however, the trend is to move out to Nuremberg (SMS/Drives) and those which stay tend to morph into a regional rather than national shows. Productronica and Electronica comes to mind, or even close like the Systems have done. I remember that sometimes at Systems there we all 12 pavilions, full of exhibitors, where now 5-6 are taken at the most. It may be some trend here but if so the crisis started way before the 2008 when Lehman Brothers bank collapsed in September.
2010/07/12
The Economist comments on the debt economy of today
Looking for faster growth for your company? Borrow money and make an acquisition. And if the economy is in recession, let the government go into deficit to bolster spending. When the European Union countries met in May to deal with the Greek crisis, they proposed a €750 billion ($900 billion) rescue programme largely consisting of even more borrowed money.
Debt increased at every level, from consumers to companies to banks to whole countries. The effect varied from country to country, but a survey by the McKinsey Global Institute found that average total debt (private and public sector combined) in ten mature economies rose from 200% of GDP in 1995 to 300% in 2008 (see chart 1 for a breakdown by country). There were even more startling rises in Iceland and Ireland, where debt-to-GDP ratios reached 1,200% and 700% respectively. The burdens proved too much for those two countries, plunging them into financial crisis. Such turmoil is a sign that debt is not the instant solution it was made out to be. The market cheer that greeted the EU package for Greece lasted just one day before the doubts resurfaced.
From early 2007 onwards there were signs that economies were reaching the limit of their ability to absorb more borrowing. The growth-boosting potential of debt seemed to peter out. According to Leigh Skene of Lombard Street Research, each additional dollar of debt was associated with less and less growth (see chart 2).
Stopping the debt supercycle
The big question is whether this rapid build-up of debt—a phenomenon which Martin Barnes of the Bank Credit Analyst, a research group, has dubbed the “debt supercycle”—has now come to an end. Debt reduction has become a hot political issue. Rioters on the streets of Athens have been protesting against the “junta of the markets” that is imposing austerity on the Greek economy, and tea-party activists in America, angry about trillion-dollar deficits and growing government involvement in the economy, have been upsetting the calculations of both the Democratic and Republican party leaderships.
To understand why debt may have become a burden rather than a boon, it is necessary to go back to first principles. Why do people, companies and countries borrow? One obvious answer is that it is the only way they can maintain their desired level of spending. Another reason is optimism; they believe the return on the borrowed money will be greater than the cost of servicing the debt. Crucially, creditors must believe that debtors’ incomes will rise; otherwise how would they be able to pay the interest and repay the capital?
From charts you can very easily deduct that countries like Germany and Canada, but especially the BRIC countries are riping positive effects of their predicament, they are fast growing, even Germany was hailed as a export champion even in the 2010 again. Canada healthy banking system (however with limited, strongly regulated competition) is not breaking the C$ raise to a par with CHF and at 1.34 to the €.
For the whole article please log in to the latest issue of the Economist.
For Embedded Industry the growth is back, however stumbling, on Allocation, on rise in prices on BOM, lead times cause delivery problems for smaller players. Who is serving Mil markets in States, or some mil markets in EMEA the business is good if not brisk. EMEA shows increase in sophistication and complexity of some new project, simply demand on performance plays increasingly stronger role.
2010/07/02
Swiss Economic Forum 2010
After a short disruption, the Economic Forum started last in June with around 1300 guests among them Tony Blair, the star of this even. He called for closer cooperation between state and economy. Using terms like freedom, democracy, tolerance and free trade he saw way out of the crisis which in his mind was financial and state at the same time. Paul Krugman, president Obama's consultant on economy noted that economic recovery is disappointing, he wanted to note that fears of inflation are missing.
Controversial discussions concentrated about the role of banks in the Swiss and in the international economies as banks in many parts of the world are being partly or mostly nationalized.
For Swiss companies it is important that banks remain partners to small and medium companies.
Leading them of the event is continous discussion on the role Switzerland should play in the new realities of Europe and the world. Since collapse of the soviet union, reunification of large tracts of central and eastern Europe, neutral Switzerland is becoming less and less relevant. Each trades with others, with little need for a place to store funds in the private bank and to send children for education. Competition from educational institutions world wide was made schools here irrelevant, and secrecy was taken away from banks by not only USA but by French, German or Italian tax authorities. Raids on banks in Lichtenstein by the Germans, in Italy on UBS branch offices, and stealing banks information on French owners of accounts here by the French tax authorities. The French had a "chutzpach" to return disks with bank data claiming they did not copied them. Yeah!
Well this year when you visit this little country, stay in hotels, dine in restaurants, you notice fewer crowds, roomier lakeshore caffe's, more parking places. Interesting being is that with strongest swiss frank in years against € the prices have not been brought down, making already high prices still higher. In affect the Swiss have priced themselves out of the business. There is noe silver lining though, the Chinese flock here like mad, their numbers trippled from a year earlier. Jewelery shops in tourist cities like Lucerne, Zurich and Geneva have deals with travel agencies and bus loads are parked in front delivering crowds buying swiss watches. Sales clerks speak any language you can imagine. Typical discount is 10% or equivalent of the roughly 8% VAT. Still, I am buying my watches at the Stevensons store in Brooklyn, NY. Unfortunately they recently stopped to carry the Omega watches.
Controversial discussions concentrated about the role of banks in the Swiss and in the international economies as banks in many parts of the world are being partly or mostly nationalized.
For Swiss companies it is important that banks remain partners to small and medium companies.
Leading them of the event is continous discussion on the role Switzerland should play in the new realities of Europe and the world. Since collapse of the soviet union, reunification of large tracts of central and eastern Europe, neutral Switzerland is becoming less and less relevant. Each trades with others, with little need for a place to store funds in the private bank and to send children for education. Competition from educational institutions world wide was made schools here irrelevant, and secrecy was taken away from banks by not only USA but by French, German or Italian tax authorities. Raids on banks in Lichtenstein by the Germans, in Italy on UBS branch offices, and stealing banks information on French owners of accounts here by the French tax authorities. The French had a "chutzpach" to return disks with bank data claiming they did not copied them. Yeah!
Well this year when you visit this little country, stay in hotels, dine in restaurants, you notice fewer crowds, roomier lakeshore caffe's, more parking places. Interesting being is that with strongest swiss frank in years against € the prices have not been brought down, making already high prices still higher. In affect the Swiss have priced themselves out of the business. There is noe silver lining though, the Chinese flock here like mad, their numbers trippled from a year earlier. Jewelery shops in tourist cities like Lucerne, Zurich and Geneva have deals with travel agencies and bus loads are parked in front delivering crowds buying swiss watches. Sales clerks speak any language you can imagine. Typical discount is 10% or equivalent of the roughly 8% VAT. Still, I am buying my watches at the Stevensons store in Brooklyn, NY. Unfortunately they recently stopped to carry the Omega watches.
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