The San Jose, Calif., area may be called Silicon Valley, but it’s not the country’s technology-employment capital. That would be the New York City area, according to the American Electronics Association.
The AeA studied data from 2006, the most recent available. It found the New York metropolitan area, from New Jersey to Long Island, had about 40 percent more tech employees than Silicon Valley. The home of Cisco Systems, eBay and Google isn’t even No. 2 on the list. That’s the Washington, D.C., area, home to many AOL workers.
San Jose did have the highest concentration of tech workers, with 286 per 1,000 total private-sector workers. No. 2 was Boulder, with 230.
Top cybercities (tech employment)
New York … 316,500
Washington, D.C. … 295,800
Silicon Valley … 225,300
Boston … 191,700
Dallas-Fort Worth … 176,000
Source: AeA
Fund “strikes” it well.
Five years ago, First Pacific Advisors’ FPA New Income fund (FPINX) said it was going on a “buyer’s strike” against most high-quality bonds. Ten-year Treasury yields were around 4 percent, too skimpy by FPA’s reckoning.
They’re still at that level, so fund managers say they’re still on strike. They haven’t given up returns in the interim.
The fund, which has $2.04 billion in assets, has gained an annualized 4.3 percent since June 2003, compared with 2.5 percent for the Lipper A-Rated Bond Fund average. The fund has invested in shorter-term debt with average credit quality above AA, as opposed to AAA.
Fed interpretations fly.
Within an hour of the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate decision Wednesday, economists were sifting through the tea leaves of the Fed’s written statement. The Fed said at 2:15 p.m. that it would hold interest rates steady.
By 2:36, High Frequency Economics’ Ian Shepherdson had sent out a report saying the statement omitted the Fed’s April 30 comment that “activity remains weak.” Instead, Shepherdson noted, the Fed said “activity continues to expand, partly reflecting some firming in household spending.” By 3:17 p.m., Payden & Rygel economist Thomas Higgins had sent out a note saying the Fed’s tone fell between a bias to do nothing and a bias to tighten rates.
That’s from his reading of this Fed line: “Although the downside risks to growth remain, they appear to have diminished somewhat, and the upside risks to inflation and inflation expectations have increased.”
Stan Choe, Ji Qi, The Associated Press
