An apology I think everyone should send to the PM

I’m afraid my usual sloppy, skim-read superficial research has given you a misleading picture of the real situation at Texas Instruments. In this morning’s opening piece, I suggested scurrilously that while TI’s sales performance has been going down a sheer cliff for three or more years, its share price continues to go up thanks to the Federal Government in Washington’s wholly owned subsidiary, Lightning Billprinters Inc.

I now realise that I did not give the full picture of TI, which is a global brand. My observations were based on US performance, and this is rather misleading. So to any Friedmanites who were gnashing their teeth at yet another stream of gratuitous insults aimed at The Great Academilt, I am forced to admit that I should also have included the highly lucrative UK market….where TI is doing really rather well.

Yes, here the situation is reversed in another dimension: instead of sales down, share price up, the British result can be summed up as sales up, employment down. So I feel it my duty to explain to you more about TI’s UK Jobless Recovery.

Accounts filed at Companies House show the group posted turnover of $110 million (£71.3m) in 2012, up from $72m the year before. That 50+% rise helped pre-tax profits leap almost 42% from $16.2m to $22.8m, with gross margins stable at 21%.

Sadly, the workforce fell from 420 in 2011 to 374 in 2012, largely a result of production operatives being axed. And in an unfortunate coincidence, in September 2011 TI bought the original company National Semiconductor in a $6.5bn deal. Jobs are hard to find on Clydeside, but 46 blokes are now in that position thanks to, um, sales having gone up by half.

Still, it’s not bad news for everyone: the highest-paid UK director saw his haul rise from $203,721 to $361,323 per annum. And the Executive pension scheme received a much-needed injection of $62m.

So then David Cameron, when achieved in this manner, profit is not a dirty word – its the wrong word. The word you seek, Prime Minister is greed.

And finally, a message from the Decency Tendency to Dan Hannan and the other useful idiots proclaiming the faultless nature of neo-liberalism.

American-model capitalism, of which you think so highly – and which is booming so boomily that payroll numbers were below expectations yet again yesterday – seems to have achieved the following in this case:

1. Rewarded obese shareholders with taxpayers’ money.

2. Rewarded directors at the expense of jobs.

3. Profited the few and pained the many.

4. Screwed up SIPP plans by cheating investors with QE.

5. Feathered the beds of the retired rich while f**king the ambitions of ordinary folks.

So yes, Milt FRiedman invented the system and it really is a lulu, innit? And per-leeeze don’t give me any more of those feeble Hannanesque excuses about “Milt wouldn’t have approved either”. Of course he wouldn’t: he was short-arsed, bald old academic who never ran a company in his life, and he knew nothing about the Alpha Male’s capacity for depravity in a world where “the only responsibility the directors have is to the shareholders”.

Don’t wriggle, Miltophiles: the silly old bastard said that, and he meant it. Because he was a silly little man who lived in an ivory tower and thus thought there was no such thing as society.

Major hat-tip on this one to the research of Slog threader Doc

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