by embedding-shape 5 hours ago
> Budget brands normally buy older DRAM fabrication equipment from mega-producers like Samsung when Samsung upgrades their DRAM lines to the latest and greatest equipment. This allows the DRAM market to expand more than it would otherwise because it makes any upgrading of the fanciest production lines to still be additive change to the market. However, Korean memory firms have been terrified that reselling old equipment to China-adjacent OEMs might trigger U.S. retaliation…and so those machines have been sitting idle in warehouses since early spring.
This seems to almost be mentioned off-hand, but isn't this a really bad and un-free market, and a much bigger issue? Korean companies are afraid of doing business with Chinese companies because of the US, because of retaliation? This was not the "free and global market" I thought we were supposed to have at this point.
If production lines of DRAM are hindered by the politics of a unrelated 3rd party, then this seems to be a stronger cause of the current shortage than "a very large customer buying a lot in a short period of time".
> This was not the "free and global market" I thought we were supposed to have at this point.
Perhaps you haven't noticed but the pendulum has been swinging the other way for a while already and has a lot of momentum behind it. It's mentioned off-hand because the ongoing return to a multi-polar global order is covered elsewhere already, across dozens of articles every day.
> has a lot of momentum behind it
Does it? It's mostly the US pushing against globalism right now. Trump managed to unite almost the entire world.
Britain? Russia? China?
Admittedly, Europe was being slow to reconfigure until finally forced to do so this year but they've jumped on board now too.
And in typical historical fashion, everybody with less little influence/independence to project their own sphere are now cautiously but attentively jockeying to accumulate the best deals they can gather among those they do.
The world is far from united, even if many do happen to share opinion about the administration.
Is it? I'm fairly certain many countries have had a very strong showing from nationalist parties in recent years, or am I way off base?
You're not wrong, globalism and nationalism go hand in hand. All those Twitter bluechecks glazing Trump and trying to drum up the right-wing controversy of the day were exposed as people from third-world countries shitting up the American infosphere for cash. When British far-right nutters say "We can't import the third world", keep in mind that third-world dictators are saying the exact same shit about other parts of the third-world. Nationalists work in lock-step.
Left-wingers are only globalist in the most literal sense of "well, I'd like it if we got rid of these migration barriers". "Internationalist" would be a better term for them.
Globalist Nationalism is an ideology of contradictions. It purports that, no really, you're the real master race and everyone else's just a stooge that'll get taken out the moment we can get rid of these pesky liberals with their freedoms. They need shittons of spatial partitioning to make that work.
"It's mostly the US pushing against globalism right now."
This is completely wrong. China and Russia are very much working against it.
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I'm not sure any realistic definition of free market would mean your actions are free from consequence.
The global market is anarchy in the literal sense and no one is bound by a higher authority. Coercion and cartels are part of a free market.
Economic efficiency actually requires a lot of rules and regulations to achieve the free market playground we like to imagine.
David Graeber in three lines
Err… is there any question that the US is trying to slow down China’s high-tech computer development? I thought that was our open goal.
Countries decided the extent to which they’d like to engage in free trade together. It is a knob that we’d hope our leaders would turn strategically. (Regardless of whether or not we think our leaders actually are doing a good job of it…).
> I thought that was our open goal.
Is the goal also to hurt South Korean businesses and all businesses in the world, just to "pwn China" basically?
We’re probably also spurring China to develop more independently. I don’t think it is a good plan, just an unconfusing one.
On paper it can sound rational. In reality you look at stuff like cars, for only so long people will tolerate buying a car for $60k when other countries, whom you are also competing with, get buy similar cars for $10-20k from China. Those same vehicles are used to boost productivity in your own domestic industries.
There is always a ton of risk involved with protectionism. Primarily whether your taxpayer-subsidized domestic jobs and hypothetical national security risk significantly outweighs all the very real economic costs.
> buying a car for $60k when other countries, whom you are also competing with, get buy similar cars for $10-20k from China
I'd love to hear your examples of this happening. For $22K you can get a BYD Dolphin Surf in Europe. And that's a pretty small car. What are you paying $60K for in the US that's the same size?
Maybe let's try a different match up. The BYD Atto 3 seems to start around 40K in Europe. It's smaller than a Model Y, and people say it is slightly lower in market position, but close enough. The Model Y starts at around 40K as well.
Are the comparisons between expensive US cars (remember the average is just above 50K, and plenty of perfectly good cars like a Honda Civic can be had for half that) and Chinese cars in China?
Atto 3 is $19.3k USD in Thailand.
So it's really just tariffs and taxes making it that expensive elsewhere.
I read that's not really the case - there's a bunch of equipment on EU-spec (and some other market) BYDs that comes from EU vendors such as Bosch. It additionally has a completely different AC unit as the kind of refrigerant BYD uses in China is illegal in the EU.
I'm not saying it justifies the price difference, but there are changes between the cars.
Right, so we are never going to see it for 20 grand in the US. Maybe because of tariffs and taxes, as you say, or maybe just because BYD isn't going to set the price at 20K in a market with 10x the average income.
> Right, so we are never going to see it for 20 grand in the US
To be fair, @dmix explicitly mentioned the $20k price was for other countries
That is a fair point. But then it just reveals that the comparison was contrived from the outset and there was no point to be made. It has never been the case that products in different markets were priced in coordination. The price is always whatever the market will bear, it has zero relationship to the cost to produce unless the market has a lot of competition.
What better way to hurt the designated enemy and make others bare the cost?
Trump's America First in practice relies on a near-sided and overly simplistic understanding of the world (Win-lose, whatever is benefitting others must be a hinderance to the USA). Hence fighting the tariff wars against allies (Canada, Eu). Hence destroying Nato' credibility that was carefully built for 70 years. Hence ceasing to be Ukraine's ally (but continuing to be a trade partner, that sells weapons as long as Europe is paying). Hence helping Putin. Hence instigating problems with Taiwan if that means that TSMC will move some manufacturing to the USA.
It's a really miopic view, but at least on their part the behavior is intentional (consequences, on the other hand, are surprise for them).
« to bear the cost », not « to bare the cost »
"America First" as an ideology means that question is never considered
I don't think you can have a "free and global market" when countries participate in large-scale state industrial policy. Given those constraints, you have to either enforce a zero-subsidy environment (the US has no power to do this) or you have to accept that trade control is one arm of your foreign policy goals and surrendering it entirely is unlikely to help your aims.
For the most part, free and open trade is beneficial to the Western world order. But I think it's quite straightforward to imagine conditions under which it is not, many of which are currently in effect.
US control of EUV technology is probably the most obvious present one, but limitations on nuclear proliferation are an obvious case where there is no free market. Even selling civilian nuclear technology is controlled.
You may think of it analogously to Free Speech. The dream is complete and total expression. The reality is that if you allow convincing enough liars, your society starts to falter. Consequently, certain kinds of expression are not permitted - notably defamation. Think of it as more a North Star navigation ideal constrained by the trade winds (I suppose the Westerlies would be more relevant, but I couldn't resist the pun).
If you want a couple of reads, I enjoyed A Splendid Exchange about the history of trade, which I followed by the resurgent-though-once-dismissed Zeihan's Disunited Nations (which is more a hypothesis book than a history book).
> I don't think you can have a "free and global market" when countries participate in large-scale state industrial policy.
All industrialized countries participate in large-scale state industrial policy. It's a pre-condition of industrialization. A nation cannot industrialize without large scale state policy. And once industrialized, all nations maintain large-scale state industrial policy. Are you saying there never has or can be a "free and global" market? Or just when china does it?
> You may think of it analogously to Free Speech.
It's nothing like free speech as free speech is a constitutional right granted within a nation.
> The reality is that if you allow convincing enough liars, your society starts to falter.
That's rich coming from someone peddling zeihan. I've always wondered what kind of morons actually believe his nonsense. Now I know.
The US industrialized without much in the way of large scale state industrial policy. The federal government was quite weak in the 19th century and, excepting tariffs on British goods, I can't think of any explicit policies it established that were intended to foster industrial capacity. And I think it's debatable how much tariffs actually helped the US develop its manufacturing capacity
> The US industrialized without much in the way of large scale state industrial policy.
What? From funding the Lewis&Clark missions, to forcing japan open, to clearing out the natives for railroad companies, to helping found colleges ( check out many engineering/tech focused colleges like MIT was founded in the 1800s ). You can even argue that american independence and the civil wars were about expanding state industrial policy.
> The federal government was quite weak in the 19th century
So "weak" that we went from 13 small states on the east coast and expanded 3000 miles all the way to the pacific? What the hell are you talking about?
> I can't think of any explicit policies it established that were intended to foster industrial capacity.
The US became the dominant industrial power in the 1800s and you can't think of any policies that helped? You think all the territories in the ohio valley, texas, oklahoma, california, etc chock full of oil were just given to americans by overly generous natives, brits or mexicans? Are you a moron?
If the US didn't have state industrial policy, the US would have never become and industrial power. We'd have just gone down the jeffersonian agrarian paradise road.
> Think of it as
did AI write this?
Boy, am I glad I wrote a killfile for Hacker News.
We left behind any pretense of a free global market once we entered a post-tariff world. You can't have large universal tariffs or even the threat of them and expect the market to act freely, the two are fundamentally incompatible.
Oh, the market will find a way around this too. The more US uses this particular button the less effective it becomes.
What free market?