Trump Era 2025-2029 : Stock and Economic Comment

TSMC has begun 4-nm chip production in US, official says
BREAKTHROUGH: The US is making chips on par in yield and quality with Taiwan, despite people saying that it could not happen, the official said.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has begun producing advanced 4-nanometer (nm) chips for US customers in Arizona, US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said, a milestone in the semiconductor efforts of the administration of US President Joe Biden.

In November last year, the commerce department finalized a US$6.6 billion grant to TSMC’s US unit for semiconductor production in Phoenix, Arizona.

“For the first time ever in our country’s history, we are making leading edge 4-nanometer chips on American soil, American workers — on par in yield and quality with Taiwan,” Raimondo said, adding that production had begun in recent weeks.

Click to expand...

Craton said:

I would hazard a guess that the US of A desperately wants the chips to be all built on it's own soil thus, not having to defend (or even worry about defending) an island on the other side of the Pacific. All without military conflict.

Click to expand...

over9k said:

Baby bust, housing bubble, overcredited, and incredibly vulnerable geography.

Think about this for a second - china gets on anyone's **** list, it has south korea, japan, mongolia, vietnam, taiwan, the philippines, burma, and russia along its land or sea borders.

The japs have been sailing across the east china sea and slaughtering them for centuries. And that's from a sea invasion, far harder than just driving your tanks across the border and blowing everything to pieces. Hell, the japs could just fly a bunch of bombers over and bomb the daylights out of them right now if they wanted. So could the koreans.

Meanwhile, to land a single boot or bullet on american soil you have to cross half the pacific ocean, take what will be an incredibly heavily defended hawaii that is also serving as a land base/support for the american navy (which could take you on long before you got anywhere near hawaii) and then the air force as it's effectively an unsinkable aircraft carrier, and then cross the other half of the pacific ocean.

The only thing china can even think about doing is taking taiwan and the fact is that the taiwanese would burn every chip facility to the ground long before the chinese actually took it (and that's assuming that the yanks didn't just cover it with about a million missile batteries shooting down or sinking anything that came anywhere near it) so they wouldn't actually be capturing anything so much as just preventing the rest of the world from having it, thereby accomplishing nothing.

Click to expand...

Knobby22 said:

China tells Trump if you want trade talks, drop the tariffs.

China tells Trump: If you want trade talks, cancel tariffs

China denies any trade talks with the US as it calls for sweeping tariffs to be cancelled.

www.bbc.com

Click to expand...

over9k said:

Meanwhile, to land a single boot or bullet on american soil you have to cross half the pacific ocean, take what will be an incredibly heavily defended hawaii that is also serving as a land base/support for the american navy (which could take you on long before you got anywhere near hawaii) and then the air force as it's effectively an unsinkable aircraft carrier, and then cross the other half of the pacific ocean.

Click to expand...

sptrawler said:

Which he will have to do, as I said before IMO the U.S currently is in the strongest position to negotiate right now, it will be all downhill from here for the West, unless it gets China to play ball.

In reality it might already be too little too late IMO, as China grows its Asian market, it becomes less and less dependent on sales to the West, then our currencies will certainly be challenged.
If or when they become the only place to source our junk, they can dictate what we will have to pay for it, especially if they don't need to sell it to us.

As we keep saying time will tell, but it certainly is interesting times.

China has an army of robots on its side in the tariff war

Enormous investments in factory equipment and artificial intelligence are giving China an edge in car manufacturing and other industries.

www.smh.com.au

Ningbo, China: China’s secret weapon in the trade war is an army of factory robots, powered by artificial intelligence, that have revolutionised manufacturing.

Factories are being automated across China at a breakneck pace. With engineers and electricians tending to fleets of robots, these operations are bringing down the cost of manufacturing while improving quality.

As a result, China’s factories will be able to keep the price of many of its exports lower, giving it an advantage in fighting the trade war and President Donald Trump’s high tariffs. China is also facing new trade barriers by the European Union and developing countries ranging from Brazil and India to Turkey and Thailand.
Factories are more automated in China than in the United States, Germany or Japan. China has more factory robots for every 10,000 manufacturing workers than any other country except South Korea or Singapore, according to the International Federation of Robotics.

China’s automation drive has been guided by government directives and backed with huge investment. As robots replace workers, automation positions China to continue to dominate mass production even as its labor force ages and becomes less willing to take industrial jobs.
Loading
He Liang, founder and CEO of Yunmu Intelligent Manufacturing, one of China’s top producers of humanoid robots, said China was striving next to turn robotics into an entire new sector of business.
“The expectation for humanoid robots is to create another electric car industry,” he said. “So from this perspective, it is a national strategy.”

Click to expand...

DannyB0000 said:

China already pays its factory workers peanuts and they still want to replace them with robots ?, talking about greed.

Click to expand...

sptrawler said:

Which he will have to do, as I said before IMO the U.S currently is in the strongest position to negotiate right now, it will be all downhill from here for the West, unless it gets China to play ball.

In reality it might already be too little too late IMO, as China grows its Asian market, it becomes less and less dependent on sales to the West, then our currencies will certainly be challenged.
If or when they become the only place to source our junk, they can dictate what we will have to pay for it, especially if they don't need to sell it to us.

As we keep saying time will tell, but it certainly is interesting times.

China has an army of robots on its side in the tariff war

Enormous investments in factory equipment and artificial intelligence are giving China an edge in car manufacturing and other industries.

www.smh.com.au

Ningbo, China: China’s secret weapon in the trade war is an army of factory robots, powered by artificial intelligence, that have revolutionised manufacturing.

Factories are being automated across China at a breakneck pace. With engineers and electricians tending to fleets of robots, these operations are bringing down the cost of manufacturing while improving quality.

As a result, China’s factories will be able to keep the price of many of its exports lower, giving it an advantage in fighting the trade war and President Donald Trump’s high tariffs. China is also facing new trade barriers by the European Union and developing countries ranging from Brazil and India to Turkey and Thailand.
Factories are more automated in China than in the United States, Germany or Japan. China has more factory robots for every 10,000 manufacturing workers than any other country except South Korea or Singapore, according to the International Federation of Robotics.

China’s automation drive has been guided by government directives and backed with huge investment. As robots replace workers, automation positions China to continue to dominate mass production even as its labor force ages and becomes less willing to take industrial jobs.
Loading
He Liang, founder and CEO of Yunmu Intelligent Manufacturing, one of China’s top producers of humanoid robots, said China was striving next to turn robotics into an entire new sector of business.
“The expectation for humanoid robots is to create another electric car industry,” he said. “So from this perspective, it is a national strategy.”

Click to expand...

Knobby22 said:

Trump had the cards but he has severely weakened his position and let China dictate terms.
I'm with Musk about his opinion of his trade advisor.

No, White House is NOT upset with Elon Musk calling Donald Trump's trade adviser Peter Navarro 'Dumb and Moron', says: 'Boys will be Boys' - The Times of India

TECH NEWS : The White House has responded to Elon Musk's harsh criticism of Donald Trump's economic advisor, Peter Navarro, downplaying the feud as a disagreement

timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Click to expand...

Knobby22 said:

She's talking rubbish. The reason the working class and middle class is destroyed is not about manufacturing.

We know this is not true because Australia also has lost most of its manufacturing base but not our middle class. In the USA, there has been a redistribution of wealth by lowering wages and redirecting more profits to the wealthy.

That said China has to be told to back down and limited.

Unfortunately due to stupidity they now have advantage which they didn't have 6 months ago.

Click to expand...

Watching the election from afar, I can’t help but wonder – is this really the best Australia can do?​

Knobby22 said:

She's talking rubbish. The reason the working class and middle class is destroyed is not about manufacturing.

We know this is not true because Australia also has lost most of its manufacturing base but not our middle class. In the USA, there has been a redistribution of wealth by lowering wages and redirecting more profits to the wealthy.

That said China has to be told to back down and limited.

Unfortunately due to stupidity they now have advantage which they didn't have 6 months ago.

Click to expand...

Conclusion​

basilio said:

Totally agree. Just a another loudmouth Trump sock puppet with his hand firmly up her derriere..

Having said that... the case for recognising and properly addressing the collapse of lower/middle class employment and opportunity is overwhelming. And not just in the US. We are in a very similar boat.

Excellent over view on the topic by Hugh Riminton. My selection is only a part of his perspective.

Watching the election from afar, I can’t help but wonder – is this really the best Australia can do?​

Hugh Riminton

With neither leader offering any serious structural reform, Australia is on a path that leads ultimately to the malaise that has befallen the US

.... The depth of dismality (my word, but feel free to use it) stems from this: Albanese and Dutton, and a reasonable proportion of the people around them, know that Australia is slowly being cooked. They know that without fundamental, sensible reforms, Australia is on the early stages of the structural path that leads ultimately towards the malaise that has befallen America. Albanese, Dutton and those around them have concluded that pushing said reforms presents risks to their current employment or their hopes of future advances.

Call that modern politics. Former Treasurer secretary Ken Henry calls it a “wilful act of bastardry”. And he’s right to call it intergenerational robbery.

So we mark time.

Unless the incoming pope declares Catholicism compulsory and birth control verboten, Australia will never again be a society that is not weighted towards the aged. Jobs in the care economy, often taken up by migrants from poorer countries, are important jobs. But despite important pay increases supported by Labor, they remain relatively lowly paid. The people working them face a potential lifetime of being cut out of the heavily distorted housing market. So will anyone else unable to take up former treasurer Joe Hockey’s famously glib advice to “get a good job that pays good money”.

........Trump’s rise in America comes from a series of fundamental societal shifts. For decades the American “heartland” was dying, a trend accelerated by the shift – “offshoring” – of manufacturing to China, to Mexico and elsewhere. Between 2010 and 2020, the US census records more than half the counties in America LOST population. That drift was largest in the so-called red states – traditional Republican party country in the midwest, great plains and the south.

The Trump contest was played out most obviously with the Democrats, but the political movement most extinguished were traditional, conservative Republicans. They are now almost gone from American public life. What drives the “Make America Great Again” movement, for all its contradictions and follies, is the restoration of hope in lives that had lost it. That hope will take some time to crumble before Americans realise the postwar manufacturing boom is never coming back, no matter what self-defeating games Trump plays with tariffs.

This is not to make a case for Trump but to sound a warning. Australia is engaged in a structural drift that will divide us into the property-holding and property-deprived classes. None of the political offerings does more than play with the edges, and half of them – super for deposits, shared equity schemes, etc – simply add to the demand side, pushing prices still higher.

Once that hope is lost, the ground will become ripe for populism, and divisions will start to bake in. The time to get moving is now. But it is already clear 2025 is not the year, or the cycle, that will see it happen.

Sometimes taking a break is useful, just to see what’s staring you in the face.

Watching the election from afar, I can’t help but wonder – is this really the best Australia can do? | Hugh Riminton

With neither leader offering any serious structural reform, Australia is on a path that leads ultimately to the malaise that has befallen the US

www.theguardian.com

Click to expand...

TimeISmoney said:

I can tell that a lot of people on here have never worked hands-on in manufacturing long term for a private enterprise. No one in their right mind would choose to get out of bed to be on a production line for the minimum wage so that the rest of Australia can sit back and enjoy a cheap Australian-made product. On top of this they get abandoned by the health care system when they're old and wrecked to end their life even faster.

People want this manufacturing in Australia, great, let their kids do the hard work and see if the participation award they got at school holds up. I can't even get anyone to mow 40 square meters of lawn for under $50, let alone a good hard day's work at a foundry, in front of a hot furnace all day. They'll have to reverse 90% of the OH&S laws and pay rates so that anyone can afford what they're making, otherwise it will be the rich buying most of it as it was years ago.

Australia needed to develop Tech and future industries years ago, but they sat on the ball doing nothing with hordes of money from mining. When you go over to places like Perth, you see it all in the repossession yards, ready to be sold at 1/2 of the original cost.

Click to expand...

basilio said:

A sign of the times. Let me count the ways..

View attachment 198190

Click to expand...

TimeISmoney said:

I can tell that a lot of people on here have never worked hands-on in manufacturing long term for a private enterprise. No one in their right mind would choose to get out of bed to be on a production line for the minimum wage so that the rest of Australia can sit back and enjoy a cheap Australian-made product. On top of this they get abandoned by the health care system when they're old and wrecked to end their life even faster.

People want this manufacturing in Australia, great, let their kids do the hard work and see if the participation award they got at school holds up. I can't even get anyone to mow 40 square meters of lawn for under $50, let alone a good hard day's work at a foundry, in front of a hot furnace all day. They'll have to reverse 90% of the OH&S laws and pay rates so that anyone can afford what they're making, otherwise it will be the rich buying most of it as it was years ago.

Australia needed to develop Tech and future industries years ago, but they sat on the ball doing nothing with hordes of money from mining. When you go over to places like Perth, you see it all in the repossession yards, ready to be sold at 1/2 of the original cost.

Click to expand...