Footer links have any value

I believe that the footer links have a very low SEO value. What do you think?

How far down are they? How much stuff comes before? What type of stuff is it? What is the context? What kind of links are they? All factors that play a big role in the answer to your question, in my opinion...

I was reffering on link exchanges

It depends on how you use them. If you think you are going to do a 3 way link exchange and just dump their anchor text on your footer with no description then that is a really crappy exchange. If you/they add a description inline text then I would call that a good exchange.

example:
Thanks for visiting my site and for more http://blackhatworld.com/ check out Black Hat World.

I prefer to use my footer to deep link my whole site


example:
Black hat | White hat | social book marking | sub-categories

I hand enter mine with title="Social book marking discussions"