Comments by "Andre Falksmen" (@andrefalksmen1264) on "The Flawed Assumptions Behind China’s Big Semiconductor Fund" video.
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@100c0c yeah, that would be a nice thought, unfortunately it's not looking that way.
I am an economist, I can come to the data, there's no country in the world besides China which is headed on course to have a significant impact. Since the 1990s there are only three countries which have been on track to enter the first world ranks.
The first, is obviously china, the other two are actually moving faster, but they are very small, that is Kazakhstan and azerbaijan. They're combined population is smaller than beijing.
When we look around the world, we see a West deep in Decline, with an aging population, unfunded social welfare obligations, stagnant socio political structures which require structural adjustment which is not politically feasible, and current account deficits.
Germany, the last of the western Nations to hold out as an industrial producer, has sacrificed itself to the American delusion of defeating Putin in ukraine.
When we look outside the west, the situation does not look promising. Obviously South Korea will continue to hold its own. Beyond that, there are no countries that are making the economic, structural, or political reforms, to set themselves up for development. India is a vain hope for those who foolishly think there is an alternative to china. Indonesia could be a force, but I don't see the Indonesians disciplined enough to climb the value chain with their natural resources. The Turks, long before erdogan, won't give up their love of Keynesian economics and constant inflationary policies.
To whom do you turn, there's no one!
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@madensmith7014 if you're aware of the state of the United states, it is unlikely that we will be in a multipolar world for very long. The world is not going to be divided in half, the Chinese have displaced the United States as the primary manufacturing nation, the primary trading nation, the world's largest consumer of commodities, the largest supplier of finished consumer goods, the world's largest supplier of producer goods. The declining situation the west, combined with the precarious finances of the West means that any long-term capital investment and innovation in the world will be coming out of China. Even here, I have my fears, because China is plague with an aging population like the west. However, alas there are no countries with growth growing economies, toward the trajectory of full scale first world development, and a young/growing population.
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@wei270 this is all quite true, I studied economics, but I work in finance. Not as much of a change, but I saw many people from the stem Fields move into management and finance.
However, this change, which many Neo Marxist academics mistakenly call "late stage capitalism" actually a result of a stagnant system in need of structural adjustment, but structural adjustment cannot be achieved because it is not politically feasible.
First off you don't have real savings, so without any real savings you try to Garner growth through quantitative easing, but even when you print the money, there's no place you can invest the money without disrupting a displacing industries, which is not politically expedient, so it goes into existing assets, creating the asset bubbles we have seen since the 1960s, where the average person in the Western World can't even afford a home and the largest metropolitan areas of their country.
If you want to be in the flow of the money, you've got to go where it's flowing, which isn't too existing assets, the financial sector. If you're a civil engineering major, you could do all right, but in the Western World there are quite a bit of barriers to real growth that requires construction, better take your math skills get an mba, and work for a real estate private equity fund.
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@Curt_Sampson I see you also suffer from the same delusion. If Putin had wanted a quick and easy victory, he would have repeated what Americans do and boomed Ukraine to the ground and occupied the rubble. Instead, he has been willing to fight a war of attrition, grinding the ukrainians down and depleting their military supplies, all in a bid to minimize civilian casualties and destruction of infrastructure. Personally I would not have gone that route, whether I believe these people are my brothers are not, try to deserve their fate, and I would have leveled Ukraine to the ground. Either way, Ukraine has no way to win this war, they are outgun in every capacity by Russia, they exist merely by Russian restraint. The war will be over soon and Russia will have its victory.
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@Spacedog79 I would agree with most of that. However I would disagree about the financial sector controlling the political landscape, the West has always been a plutocracy, and that was for the best. However, that plutocracy was made up of men who owned businesses that produced real things, sure the financial interest was always represented, industry requires quite a bit of capital, but that Capital financed real production. Over the last 70 years, the West has become more democratic we see this in the United States with the introduction of the primary system, whereas before party bosses appointed the candidates representing each party in an election. We see the same in europe, with more Grassroots organization of the masses and they said selection of candidates, all of this has made for a messy and disruptive political sphere. As we learned from the 1930s, unbridled democracy in the west leads to populous fascism, to the left or to the right it doesn't matter, the masses are easily pimped by those promising free things and retribution.
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@rotinoma what China has is a massive amount of capital, willpower, and a huge domestic market. China is looking to recreate the entire semiconductor supply chain within its borders, both for security and economic reasons, and will succeed in doing so. There are a number of additional factors that will determine whether or not Chinese production will undercut the rest of the global marketplace, you must remember that China is as large in population as the the entire developed Western world combined, I regard Latin America as Western but underdeveloped, so that is a possibility. The existing supply chain could continue to exist to supply South Korea and japan, and you could even have a situation where manufacturers use Chinese Source chips for products destined for the Chinese market and countries friendly to china, while using non Chinese Source chips for Western countries and countries antagonistic to China. However if this proves to be a major price disadvantage, the lower cost for advanced technology rebounds to China's benefit.
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@thealienrobotanthropologist okay, let's drop the conspiratorial populous cloak.
The Western Elites are first and foremost western, and proud chauvinist, they don't hate their countrymen, they indulge them, and that is the problem. The Western Elites have bent over backward to accommodate their mass, and that is why they are in the trouble they are in. After World War ii, Western workers were given extremely indulgent pay and benefits packages, far beyond anything that could be supported by the productivity of the workforce. Hence, globalization is a response to try to prop up living standards Beyond productivity, by sourcing production from lower cost countries. All of this is made possible by artificially high value of Western currencies relative to their non-western manufacturing peers. Because global trade is priced in us dollars, will support my commodities, and the US will support the currencies of other Western countries, non-western manufacturing countries are forced to devalue their currencies, propping up Western living standards, in order to be competitive.
What are the bloated balance sheets about, what are the deficits, and the debt about, it is social welfare spending, it is the government employee, it is the free social services, all these things are for the masses, not the elite. Sure the Western Elite have made money as they can from globalization, from the asset price bubble, but the insolvency in Western economies comes from indulging the masses, not the elite. The lack of savings, the welfare benefits, the wages of a productivity, the demands of the unions, the lack of applicable job skills, these are all choices of the masses not of the elite.
When we speak of a multipolar world, we are speaking of a world in which there are more than three nations that can hold their own economically and technologically, and that is not likely to happen sure you can close your doors, but that does not mean that you will have the domestic savings, talent, or willpower to be a manufacturing and technological powerhouse on your own, and without that you will not have the economic gravity to be a pole in a multipolar world.
The increase hostility toward China is the growing realization and the part of the Elites in the west that China is going to displace them because they cannot and will not discipline their mass. The Chinese Elite have no problem whipping the mass of China into shape. The Chinese have domestic savings, they have high productivity, wages in line with productivity, and real investment on hampered by lobbying and interest groups. The West has thought it could curtel China's Advance by controlling the supply of natural resources, largely by destabilizing africa, but Russia stands prepared to supply China with all of the natural resources that it desires. With an alliance between Russia and china, and China's own internal discipline and focus, the Western Elites have no ability to stop the growth of china. And it is culturally, politically, and economically impossible to revive the fortunes of the West because they don't have the stomach to put their mass in line.
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@Moped_Mike no, China blows America out of the water, and every other Western Country on a per capita basis, only on per Capital GDP in nominal terms does the United States run supreme. Also, when you correct the US numbers for units of production, rather than using dollar figures, over inflated US Government procurement prices, we see that the situation for the US is even worse. But at the end of the day all you have to do is consider that us net, not gross, imports, are higher than it's Total Industrial out.
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@ruedelta there's quite a bit unpack there. First off a nation of over a billion people is not going to be a service economy, at least not one that is first world.
Secondly, climate change has not been all bad for all the peoples at the equator, at least in the case of Africa it is actually led to more mild temperatures and increasing regreening of desert spaces. As well as an unexplained regrowth of trees in Savannah areas.
The Dynamics of a developed Indonesia would be quite unique, something that has never been seen before because Indonesia would not be a raw commodity importer, it has all the Commodities necessary for an industrial base within its own borders. Such a situation has only been seen in the case of the Soviet union, a nation having both an industrial base and the resources to support industry within their own borders. However, the major difference between the Soviet Union and it developed Indonesia would be, presumably, Indonesia would be a market-oriented economy. Again, there are a number of nations in the world which have all of the resources necessary to support industrial development, none aside from the Soviet union, have put aside the natural resource curse to take the funds and climb the value added ladder.
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@Curt_Sampson I'm not looking to have a debate with you about the merits of the war in ukraine. Russia acted reasonably given the danger it faced. A NATO aligned Ukraine could never be allowed on Russia's doorstep. To allow NATO in Ukraine would be to have NATO troops and arms on Russia's doorstep, which would mean NATO nuclear weapons too close to Russia for an early warning system to work, forcing Russia to make blind threat assessments, essentially creating a potential second Cuban Missile Crisis situation.
Putin did not bomb mariopol to the ground, to the contrary, he ordered his troops to surround the azov steelworks and force the Neo-Nazi soldiers based there to surrender, only using bombs on the last few remaining fighters. Again, contrast Putin's actions in Ukraine to America's actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Americans bombed every piece of infrastructure, every military command center, and the civilian population Centers before they sent one ground troop into combat.
Putin believes that the ukrainians are his people, fellow Orthodox Christian slavs, and so he is not prepared to take such actions against them. However, once again Ukraine exist at Russia's pleasure, if tomorrow Putin grows tired of this nonsense and decides to launch non-nuclear ICBM missiles, 2,000 of them which Russia has more than enough, there will not be a Ukraine left to fight.
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@Curt_Sampson the continued Eastward expansion of NATO has been a source of contention with the Russians since the mid 1990s. Even because Gorbachev stated that Russia has been treated with disrespect and that the West continues to provoke russia. Secondly, according to both let me call Gorbachev and James baker, the United States promised Russia there would be no Eastern expansion of nato, a promise that Bill Clinton broke. While Baltic countries are members of nato, there are no strategic weapons stationed there, for the exact reason why Ukraine cannot be a member of nato. This could all have been avoided if the United States had acted in a restrained manner, but they have been threatening Russian security since the end of the cold war, and have been attempting to collapse the Russian State since it's revitalization under putin. The long-term plan is to neutralize Russia as a threat, and this is only caused a Resurgence of the Russian state. The West said hope to arrest its decline by paralyzing the Russian State and helping it would become as weaken as dysfunctional as ukraine, in the end this was all to contain china, instead they have driven Russia into China's arms, and the two together will devour the West.
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@Curt_Sampson lol. Europe is economically bleeding trying to support latest position on ukraine. Winter is coming, and Europeans will go cold, hungry, and unemployed. How long do you think Europe can last with 20% inflation and 600% increases and energy cost? I hope you don't believe in a fantasy of an alternative energy supplier to russia. Let me help you understand that compressed natural gas, like the kind that comes from russia, even before the crisis was six four to six times cheaper than l&g. Not to mention LNG requires specialized facilities on both the shipping and receiving end, as well as specialized ships to transport it. Any other line coming from the East would have to cross turkey, which has its own issues with regard to europe. Anything from africa, well that would require European to stop destabilizing africa. There is no alternative to Russian energy for europe, and therefore Russia can strangle the Earth, as it is. However, the Real Salt in the wound is the Chinese prepare to purchase all of the gas Europe was buying and more, at a lower discount to market!
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