PhillyDeals: U.K. to buy 14 Chinook helipters built in Delaware County

Boeing Corp. says the United Kingdom's Ministry of Defense has agreed to pay $1.64 billion for 14 new Chinook CH-47 heavy-lifting helicopters, to be built at the Boeing works in Ridley Township, Delaware County, and extended service for the copters.

Boeing wouldn't project how many workers will be hired to meet demand, but he noted that the deal followed a $130 million, two-year upgrade that doubled Chinook manufacturing capacity at the plant to six a month. "It's a great sign for the 6,000-strong workforce we have in Philadelphia," said Damien Mills, Boeing spokesman.

"They're still hiring. We did an orientation for 24 sheet-metal guys the other day," said Christopher Owens, president of UAW Local 1069, which represents 2,000 production workers at the plant. Owens called employment at the plant "the highest we've been for a long time."

The British deal "is huge for us," Owens said. He spoke from a union convention where he told delegates he'd won support from Sen. Pat Toomey (R., Pa.) and Philadelphia-area Reps. Bob Brady (D.) and Pat Meehan (R.) to push for continued federal spending on the plant's other war craft, the V-22 Osprey.

The new helicopters will be delivered from 2013 through 2015. The British use Chinooks in Iraq and Afghanistan alongside U.S. military forces.

Nearly 800 Chinooks are flying worldwide, more than half for the U.S. Army and the Special Operations Command, the rest for 19 other countries, Boeing spokesman Tom Marinucci said. The first Chinooks were built 50 years ago, near the start of the Vietnam War.

Is the price of gold too high or too low?

Yes, say the experts at Wells Fargo & Co.

With gold approaching the (inflation-adjusted) 1980 record high of $1,952 an ounce, "we still do not believe gold is a bubble about to burst, because the underlying conditions that have pushed gold to these levels are not expected to be resolved for some time," writes Scott Anderson, senior economist at Wells Fargo, the biggest bank in Philadelphia and many other U.S. markets. In a report to clients Monday, Anderson mentioned "dollar weakness," the euro debt crisis, and U.S. deficit uncertainty as the conditions that will drive gold higher.

But "gold investing has reached the level of a speculative bubble," which looks a lot like past housing, Internet stock, and Japan investing bubbles, wrote Dean Junkans, chief investment officer for wealthy individual clients at Wells Fargo's private banking division, in a separate report last week.

"The current price of gold is a bubble that is poised to bust," Junkans added. "It's happened before, and, even if prices briefly top $2,000, "we will be proven right in the long run."

Have Junkans and Anderson discussed their differences? They did not respond to calls Monday. This leaves us to wonder if this is a sign of vigorous and healthy debate - or if Wells Fargo is just making sure that, no matter what happens to the price of gold, someone there will be able to claim he saw it coming.

"There has been a great deal of vacuous nonsense" written about Google Inc.'s planned $12.5 billion takeover of Motorola Mobility Inc., its wireless-phone factories and patents, and its Horsham-based video-equipment business, writes Craig Moffett, veteran telecom analyst at Bernstein Research in New York.

He called "absurd" the idea that Google will use its purchase of Motorola's Google Android and its Horsham-based cable-TV set-top box manufacturing businesses to propel Google into "disruptive" competition against established telecom giants such as Comcast.

To the contrary, writes Moffett, the deal makes Google the "largest equipment supplier to the cable industry," so it is not likely to risk billions in sales and profits trying to "undermine" Comcast, when it can make more money cooperating to extend digital advertising - Google's main business - to Comcast's wireless video customers.