In theory yes but aren’t you worried that your investments may be suddenly made untradeable/void?
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Okay. If this doesn’t happen then there is no problem
If it does happen, it’s equivalent of removing gold backing from USD that happened in last century
Very much so.
There is a lot more incentive here for the US. Most of the world’s high tech chips come from there.
I would start to worry when there are enough fabs in the US for them to risk that. But for now should be safe.
I agree US has more interests here than with Ukraine. Although one worrying sign is the push to re-shore IC manufacture in the US. It looks potentially like a move to reduce reliance on TW so that one day they could ‘walk away’.
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I feel the same way. I mean TSMC is building fabs in the US. Once enough capacity is there, Taiwan will be dropped and is on its own likely. But that’s probably a decade away still.
AFAIK not only to the US, but Europe too
Thing is, even TSMC is reliant on Zeiss optics to make the chips.
I don’t think it will ever happen.
US actually has a lot of semiconductor manufacturing, but there are also so many cross-border steps that are done in each country, even if they build the fabs, are they also going to build assembly, testing, packaging, resists, etc. etc.
These have built-up over decades in Asia. Even if somehow miraculously you replicate all of them, it is still not going to be cost competitive.
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Maximum fear might depress prices, but selective (expropriation) risk is not priced fairly by the market.
If someone wants to buy gold why would they not buy yours if you sold for 95% of the price elsewhere (because you have a 50% expropriation risk this week).
If your side has too much gold to sell for the capacity at that price, the local price will go down, but more and more capital will start acting as arbitrageurs for this better and better opportunity. You would only rationally stop selling if the local price hits 50%.
It’s a bit less transparent with company shares. But you bet, someone (without your risks) will take your reasonably profitable company from your hands for half the price (and sell another more expensive company).
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Speak of the devil, just fresh from the press:
Tsmc to invest 100 billion in US fabs.
Funny it’s 100B, not 500B (if you didn’t notice 500B is kinda a magic number now, it appears all the time, e.g. stargate, apple investment, ukraine deal, etc)
Don’t forget the 1 trillion from Saudi Arabia!!!
You know Elon isn’t behind it because it doesn’t spell 800B, nor is 420.69B.
—>[]
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To be fair, its basically a continuation of the previous policies (e.g. chips act 2022)
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Also interesting how China (here Alibaba) pushes for independence with open source Risc V development (Hacker News link today… see comments). Transfer chip production to US before Taiwan is invaded??
As far as I know TSMC make the super high tech stuff only in Taiwan. They still try not to do that in foreign locations
Maybe that’s their way to keep „cards“ in their pockets to deal with transaction oriented world
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Yeah. They had that policy for a while and made the mistake of saying “we’ll keep the latest tech in TW”. When Trump heard this he got mad and then they relented and said they’ll put the latest in US too. In reality, I don’t think they will. Trump will be long gone.
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I watched an interesting documentary and a news reporter shared that based on his inner circle feedback , he learnt the following about current US administration mindset
The administration believes that the rules based world order is acting as a obstacle for them because it forces them to also follow the rules and doesn’t allow them to squeeze smaller countries to get what they want.
In other words they are biggest economic power & military power in world but because they had to play by rules in past, they were restricted because they had to be fair.
I think it makes a lot of sense as perhaps explains what else we can see in future. Not sure how this will impact the long term prospects
It will be a good test of Respect vs Fear.
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I watched the news . They are claiming TSMC is investing because of tariff.
This is such a joke. If there is no competition of TSMC, applying tariffs of 25% would only increase the cost for customers of chips and there is nothing they could do about it because where else would they buy ? Intel 
So this investment has nothing to do with Tariffs but it is about threatening Taiwan behind the doors
What happened? After markets opened I was up 0.5%. Now I check I’m down 0.5%. Did Cortana buy again?
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