Comments by "capmidnite" (@capmidnite) on "Asianometry" channel.

  1. When you owe $1 million to the bank, it's your problem. When you owe $100 million to the bank, it's the bank's problem.
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  2. Manchuria actually became a testing ground to nurture new companies outside of the influence of the Zaibatsu. The IJA that ran things was suspicious of the zaibatsu but knew the talent of private entrepreneurs was necessary. Thus Yoshisuke Aikawa, the founder of Nissan, was tapped to help establish the Manchurian Industrial Development Company.
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  3. What an interesting contrast to POSCO, South Korea's attempt at building up an indigenous steel industry. It was initially predicted to be an expensive failure but ended up producing steel at competitive prices and ended up supplying Korean industrial sectors such as automobiles and construction.
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  4. Many other underdeveloped countries received massive amounts of foreign aid and tried to build export-oriented industries around the same time (1950s 60’s 70s) but failed to mature the same way the Korean economy did.
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  5. 12:49 I wonder why Indian had customs duty on fab equipment? Typically such duties are to protect domestic makers of such equipment. Which don't exist in India, I believe?
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  6. I think the Industrial Revolution in Europe wasn’t started by the established landed aristocracy. Rather, it was the upstart merchant class and “hands on” type of men that built the first factories and companies.
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  7. MIT's nickname in the 1980s was "Made in Taiwan" because it had so many Taiwanese grad students.
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  8. I heard in the 1990s Japanese chip engineers moonlighted for up and coming Korean chip fab companies, which wasn't too hard to do considering it's only a 2.5 hour flight between the two countries. Since then, Japanese chip companies have never recovered their position, at least in sectors such as memory.
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  9.  @leothelion6075  I think until a generation ago the Japanese had a reputation for IP theft and mimicry. And mercantile trade policies.
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  10. Ssang Yong is a very niche Korean automaker, largely unknown outside of South Korea. However, in the early 1990s Mercedes Benz found them good enough to do some technology and platform sharing with them. Ssang Yong's Chairman sedan is based on the E-class and their SUVs used MB drivetrains.
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  11. In both South Korea and Taiwan, the most prestigious flagship university of each country has their origins in the Imperial Japanese University system. SNU in Korea started out as Keijo Imperial University and NTU in Taiwan started out as Taihoku Imperial University. In both countries, these universities are seen as being a notch above the next top universities and have produced a disproportionate number of political leaders, CEOs and professionals.
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  12.  @thetigerii9506  Singapore while East Asian in culture isn’t part of geographic East Asia.
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  13.  @geraldh.8047  True but I always thought customs duty as a steady revenue source for the government was more of a 19th century idea, before taxes.
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  14. I'm still trying to figure out how 1% control of a typical Korean company translates to a controlling interest in the whole group by the founding family. I "get" how cross-holding works in theory but why would the other shareholders put up with this arrangement?
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  15. I wonder if it is possible for chip making to become a lost art in the future, maybe because of conflict in the region? There's so much know-how, experience and IP involved, not just capital equipment and raw materials. Technology can become "lost." The rockets and other equipment used in the Apollo mission cannot be duplicated anymore, even though the blueprints are still around. Or take a Stradivarius, which no one today has been able to duplicate. Or the secret of Damascus steel, which has never been exactly duplicated by modern sword smiths.
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  16. Ah, Mitsubishi. The fabled Japanese zaibatsu which helped build and arm Japan from the Meiji Era to the modern era.
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  17.  @francisdayon  “We need to move the system to meritocracy where capable leaders are promoted.” Who does the “promoting” and how? You seem to admire the Chinese model of authoritarian technocratic leadership combined with a strongman (Xi) on top. Chinese leaders get to the top through years of internal power building and back scratching in the CCP. The Japanese government with its elite bureaucracy has also followed a technocratic model since the Meiji Era with various levels of authoritarianism and militarism creeping in. The rules and rights based Constitutional government of the United States has been around since 1776 (when the rest of the world was under some form of tyranny) and has so far brought prosperity, rule of law and freedom to the American people. Even countries in Europe in that span of time have flirted with dictatorship, fascism, Communism and numerous revolutions. You seem to have little faith in representative democracy.
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  18.  @yixuanzhong6568  Right, but does India have a significant foundry production machinery industry that needs to be protected? Not the fab industry but the actual equipment.
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  19.  @ZontarDow  Maybe in financial terms the colonies didn't make sense. But in terms of strategic value and prestige, Japan's first colonies (Taiwan and Korea) were immensely valuable. They showed the world Japan was a colonizing power just like Britain and France. And during WW2 both colonies ended up contributing about 200,000 soldiers each to the war effort.
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  20. And ironically, when you take your cell phone out of your pocket to look at the time, you're doing the same thing people did with their pocket watches before wrist watches became a thing.
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  21. I think in the 1980s there was also a scandal where Toshiba sold machine tools to the Soviets necessary to make quieter submarine propellers.
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  22. Sorry, but "America" as short-hand for the USA has a long history of use and is not the same as calling China "Asia." The US was called "America" long before any other country in the Western hemisphere became independent.
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  23.  @kurikuraconkuritas  Uh no, not everything is about TRUMP. Japan and Korea have had their own local disputes. The most recent was sparked when the Korean courts upheld a suit against Japanese companies for compensation for forced labor during WW2 and allowed Japanese assets in South Korea to be seized. The Japanese retaliated by slowing the export of chemicals needed for semi-conductor production to Korea.
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  24. I guess the biggest example would be China or the USA (which has a strategic interest in maintaining its domestic fab capability). However, the question then arises how independent does the domestic fab industry have to be? Crucial components in fab production such as hydrogen flouride, lithography machines and software are controlled by a few countries.
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  25.  @hoangle2483  The US economy is so huge and diversified it can’t really be dominated by a handful of companies like the Korean economy. There ARE regional centers of corporate influence such as the DuPont company in Delaware, or the Ford Motor Company which has been controlled by the Ford family like a chaebol.
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  26.  @hoangle2483  I understand that green card holders in India are highly sought after candidates for marriage.
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  27. The growth of the Korean economy in the 1960 through the 80s was built on a fast-follower model, with rapid absorption of technology and processes already developed overseas. The challenge facing the Korean economy now is to develop the NEXT generation of industries and tech, without knowing what it will be. In some ways, that's as much of a challenge as what faced Korean engineers in the old days.
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  28. The Chinese characters for chaebol are the same as “zaibatsu” (or family wealth), incidentally.
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  29.  @francisdayon  I don’t know what country you are from but in the USA the mayor of a city isn’t directly responsible for “growth.” The job of a mayor is to provide for the public safety and public necessities (roads, parks) for the citizens. I believe there’s an Asianometry video about the problems China is having with debt bubbles, real estate crashing and provincial leaders throwing up a mirage of “growth” that is fueled by unsustainable debt.
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  30. One side effect of the collapse of the American shoe manufacturing industry is that the few Made in USA shoe brands that are left have become highly desirable worldwide, with a cult following (especially in East Asia). Brands such as Red Wing boots and New Balance.
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  31. Remember all that “Japan is taking over” anxiety in the 1980s? And movies like Black Rain? The world sure looks different today.
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  32. The Singaporeans are like the Dutch of the East. They make money through trade and shipping and yet they also have high value-added industries.
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  33.  @mrwideboy  I believe the quote is attributed to J Paul Getty.
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  34. Most Taiwanese I meet seem to have a positive view of the Japanese people and culture. One Taiwanese told me the Japanese intended Taiwan to be a model colony of sorts, a place where Japanese could retire to at the end of their working careers.
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  35.  @Vlasov45  I think they still name Shinkansen trains after the high speed steam locomotives of the Manchurian Railway. The lost dream of Manchuria still haunts the Japanese imagination.
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  36. No mention of the classic 1986 movie Gung Ho inspired by the Nummi plant?
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  37.  @msp5138 You are just babbling at this point. A city can have little economic growth but still have an established tax base. For example, NYC has been losing jobs and corporate HQs in the past decade. The state of New York on the whole has average 1 % growth. The big topics in the past NYC mayoral race was crime and Progressive politics, not “growth.” The people continue to elect the same stupid politicians again and again.
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  38. To everyone trying to point out the correct pronunciation of "Jena", it's like expecting an English speaker to pronounce Paris as "Paree".
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  39.  @appleslover  What about them? It's not some big secret and well documented elsewhere. This channel is about Asian Economies. Admittedly, the local Chinese who provided most of the grunt work for the heavy industries of Manchuria were treated very harshly, almost like slave labor. So maybe that should be mentioned.
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  40. Despite the undue influence, size and power of the chaebols, many if not the majority of South Koreans are proud of their worldwide influence and competitiveness. There’s a “Korea is a small country” mentality and the assumption is that South Korean companies can only compete with established Western and Japanese companies by being huge. Also, the Netherlands (for example) is dominated by a handful of huge companies such as Shell but outsiders don’t perceive the Dutch economy as being one dominated by “the rich.”
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  41. 4:09 The former RCA building is now a converted apartment complex in Camden, NJ. The surrounding area is a desolate industrial wasteland.
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  42. Not really, SK stands for Sunkyong Group, the original holding company that bought out Hynix.
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  43.  @SMGJohn  But the North Korean steel mills were built by the Japanese.
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  44. And Apple watch batteries last less than a day before needing to be charged!
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  45. One thing Koreans will never admit is that the Japanese colonial period laid the foundations of a modern society. The Japanese introduced mass education and dismantled the feudal order of old Chosun. The Korean population doubled during the colonial period. By 1945 there was a small nucleus of educated Koreans with technical and managerial skills. The founder of Samsung went to Waseda University, for example. And Park Chung Hee was proud of his service in the Imperial Japanese Army.
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  46. The Taiwanese also have a virtual monopoly on the mid-price tier bicycle and component manufacturing market. But I guess that's a story for a different time.
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  47. 17:31 Nice reference! I believe the original quote is "Nobunaga pounded the rice, Hideyoshi baked the cake and Tokugawa ate it" in reference to the final winner of the Sengoku Wars. Although, the industry is so fast moving who knows what the outcome will be in 10 to 20 years?
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  48. The lens is a critical part of the lithography machines but so what? Canon and Nikon tried to compete with ASML but couldn't. It wasn't because of the lens technology. It was because of all the know-how and components that ASML put together in one machine.
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  49. The short history is that there was this Miracle on the Han in which the South Koreans rose from Third World status to First World through sheer grit and determination, coupled with ever rising exports and climbing up the value chain (from wigs to textiles to cheap electronics to semiconductors). What the Koreans will never directly acknowledge is that Japanese colonization brought to Korea modern education and infrastructure (like Taiwan and their colonization by the Japanese). It was true the Japanese built an economy designed to serve their interests, but they did introduce mass education and the rail lines they built are still used today. After they left, a small nucleus of native Korean technocrats, engineers and professionals remained. The best university in Korea (SNU) has its roots in Keijo Imperial University, for example. The Korean War brought an influx of American military contracts and know-how (many Korean construction companies got their start working with the US Army Corps of Engineers).
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  50.  @inomo  A Mexican, Canadian or even an inhabitant of the USA is "North American."
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