The mayors of San Jose, Santa Clara and Fremont, along with financial experts, participated in a summit hosted by the Silicon Valley-San Jose Business Journal and City National Bank.
Financial experts gave their local and national economic outlook for 2009 and an overview of the Silicon Valley commercial real estate market. Some data shows the credit markets starting to normalize.
Many feel until the fed gets money flowing again, the region will experience a slowdown in projects.
San Jose's mayor, Chuck Reed, says growth of clean tech companies is also on hold. "About a half dozen clean tech companies that we're working with to try and identify opportunities to expand -- we'd like them to do that in San Jose, but they're not going to be able to do that without credit market financing for some of their work."
Many Silicon Valley-based high tech companies are getting hit by the downturn as well. Google just announced a first-ever drop in quarterly profits, Yahoo! is freezing salaries for remaining workers, and Sun Microsystems has started laying off 6,000 employees.
