US-China tech war: Beijing’s secret chipmaking champions
Once a month, senior executives of Yangtze Memory Technologies Co fly to Beijing for a flurry of meetings with China’s top economic management bodies. They focus on the company’s efforts to build some of the world’s most advanced computer memory chips and its progress on weaning itself off American technology.
Based in the central riverside city of Wuhan, Yangtze Memory is considered at the vanguard of the country’s efforts to create a domestic semiconductor industry, already mass-producing state of the art 64-layer and 128-layer Nand flash memory chips, used in most electronics from smartphones to servers to connected cars.
Politics
“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” –James Madison, Federalist 51
“They had one weapon left and both knew it: treachery.” –Frank Herbert, Dune “They had learned nothing, and forgotten nothing.” –Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord
Biden Administration
“The American Rescue Plan as Economic Theory” [J.W. Mason]. “The size and design of ARPA is a more consequential rejection of this [prevailing macroeconomic] catechism. Without being described as such, it’s a decisive recognition of half a dozen points that those of us on the left side of the macroeconomic debate have been making for years. 1. The official unemployment rate is an unreliable guide to the true degree of labor market slack, all the time and especially in downturns. … n… 2. The balance of macroeconomic risks is not symmetrical. We don’t live in an economy that fluctuates around a long-term growth path, but one that pe
Xiaomi is now suing the US government in hopes of reversing investment ban
The ongoing Xiaomi/US saga is quickly escalating. If you haven t been following it closely, basically one of the swan songs of Trump s government was to designate Xiaomi as a “Communist Chinese military company”. A title that would qualify it to fall under the administration s Executive Order from November that bars American securities and investment companies from putting capital in said companies.
What being on the list currently entails in more practical terms is that if the decision stands all American institutional investors in Xiaomi would be forced to withdraw holdings in the company by November. Some of the more notable US investors that would have to comply include Qualcomm Inc., BlackRock Inc., the Vanguard Group Inc. and State Street Corp.