Skip to main content

Export Import bank of the United States of America -- Now that's intersting

The tea party has won, this fight anyway, it looks like US Eximbank's  may end up in the dustbin. The long term impact is minimal, the US can work to remove the other export import banks.  For companies the short term is more serious.  Exim Bank provided credit support to many many companies from confirmation of letters of credit to loan guarantees to Boeing.  For some reason America's far right has real issues with Boeing and the aerospace and defence sector, as a Canadian I can only say -- bring it on, because Canada would be a natural home for a lot of Boeing's non-defence work, these are very high paying jobs that require lots of skills and once the jobs are gone, they tend not to come back.

Canada has an export import bank called EDC, they too use Canada's credit rating to provide Canadian exporters with long term finance, letters of credit etc.  the cost to the Canadian tax payer has been nil for several years, in fact, EDC has only used Canada's borrowing capacity.  It has proven to be a very successful program, and by the way, Canadian banks have very limited interest in stepping in their shoes!

What the GOP congress is doing is just strange, Boeing's CEO will now look seriously at offshoring a lot of their activities.  So that they can benefit from other credit agencies support.  They seem to think that banks love the finance exports to Africa (they don't) or to confirm letters of credits from strange country (that too they don't like).  Exim is a very important tool to help America's export sector. Then again I suspect that many of the GOP have no real use for these pesky foreigners!

The idea seems to be that the banks will step in (maybe they will) but in general banks are not too keen on this type of business, new capital rules (for banks) make that business cumbersome and unprofitable (yes yes that too).  My guess is that the anti-Eximbank is driven by a fear of big government and they probably think that Eximbank is in cahoot with the world bank and its all part of a big plan to take over 'merica and impose martial law!

Its very strange, but then this is the party that think that Donald Trump and Scott Walker are heros!



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ok so I lied...a little (revised)

When we began looking at farming in 2013/14 as something we both wanted to do as a "second career" we invested time and money to understand what sector of farming was profitable.  A few things emerged, First, high-quality, source-proven, organic farm products consistently have much higher profit margins.  Secondly, transformation accounted for nearly 80% of total profits, and production and distribution accounted for 20% of profits: Farmers and retailers have low profit margins and the middle bits make all the money. A profitable farm operation needs to be involved in the transformation of its produce.  The low-hanging fruits: cheese and butter.  Milk, generates a profit margin of 5% to 8%, depending on milk quality.  Transformed into cheese and butter, and the profit margin rises to 40% (Taking into account all costs).  Second:  20% of a steer carcass is ground beef quality.  The price is low, because (a) a high percentage of the carcass, and (b) ground beef requires process

21st century milk parlour

When we first looked at building our farm in 2018, we made a few money-saving decisions, the most important is that we purchased our milk herd from a retiring farmer and we also purchased his milking parlour equipment.  It was the right decision at the time.  The equipment dates from around 2004/05 and was perfectly serviceable, our installers replaced some tubing but otherwise, the milking parlour was in good shape.  It is a mature technology. Now, we are building a brand new milk parlour because our milking cows are moving from the old farm to the new farm.  So we are looking at brand new equipment this time because, after 20 years of daily service, the old cattle parlour's systems need to be replaced.  Fear not it will not be destroyed instead good chunks will end up on Facebook's marketplace and be sold to other farmers for spare parts or expansion of their current systems. All our cattle are chipped, nothing unusual there, we have sensors throughout the farm, and our milki

So we sold surplus electricity one time last summer...(Update)

I guess that we will be buying an additional tank for our methane after all.   Over the past few months, we've had several electricity utilities/distributors which operate in our region come to the farm to "inspect our power plant facilities, to ensure they conform to their requirements".  This is entirely my fault.  Last summer we were accumulating too much methane for our tankage capacity, and so instead of selling the excess gas, that would have cost us some money, we (and I mean me) decided to produce excess electricity and sell it to the grid.  Because of all the rules and regulations, we had to specify our overall capacity and timing for the sale of electricity (our capacity is almost 200 Kw) which is a lot but more importantly, it's available 24/7, because it's gas powered.  It should be noted that the two generators are large because we burn methane and smaller generators are difficult to adapt to burn unconventional gas, plus they are advanced and can &qu