TSMC sales miss for second straight quarter on tepid demand | Hacker News Reader

TSMC sales miss for second straight quarter on tepid demand

bloomberg.com

75 pointsmfiguiere90 comments

Is it strange there’s no mention of the chip shortage? Bloomberg was even reporting on it wrt TSMC as little as 4 months ago [1]. Isn’t a slowdown a good thing and the predictable end of the chip shortage? TSMC gets no credit now for having caught up? It’ll never cease to amaze me that our economy and financial reporting runs on the deltas between reality and incorrect predictions (even when, like here, the outcome is somewhat predictable), and we continue to blame reality for not meeting the predictions. It also seems strange not to mention that TSMC’s growth has been insane for the last 4 years, their business has tripled.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-12/tsmc-chie...

IIRC, the chip shortage was mostly for chips made on older process nodes and TSMC does less business on older process nodes than other fabs? If so, then there might not be a inconsistency in reporting; TSMC may still have a backlog of orders for chips made using older nodes while seeing slackening demand for chips made using its much more profitable cutting edge nodes.

"Nowadays TSMC earns around 25% of its revenue by making hundreds of millions of chips using 40 nm and larger nodes. For other foundries, the share of revenue earned on mature process technologies is higher: UMC gets 80% of its revenue on 40 nm higher nodes, whereas 81.4% of SMIC's revenue come from outdated processes." from https://www.anandtech.com/show/17470/tsmc-to-customers-time-... and a quick check says TSMC's 40 nm mode was first introduced around 2008.

> TSMC gets no credit now for having caught up?

Bloomberg's reporting on it from an earnings/business perspective - while it's great for the world in general that the chip shortage seems to have subsided a bit, it would be better for TSMC if demand continued to exceed their production (particularly since they're not vulnerable to competition taking their market share, at least in the short term).

> no mention of the chip shortage

Because the shortage chips were not manufactured by TSMC? You don't need 3nm for every chip.

I recall there being a shortage of cutting edge chips as well[1]. In fact, there have even been a few articles about TSMC seeing the end of the shortage at the start of the year[2].

[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/tsmc-warns-of-tight-production-... [2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-12/tsmc-chie...

> Because the shortage chips were not manufactured by TSMC?

Why do you think that? I included a link to an article that discusses it.

Here’s a link to TSMC’s car-chip products: https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/pla...

And a link to TSMC CEO talking about not meeting car-chip demand: https://canada.autonews.com/microchips/chip-shortage-thats-h...

TSMC works with several node sizes, even bigger than 40mm. it is not where most of their profit and revenue is, but it is still a sizable market for them.

I'm not an economist or market prognosticator nor do I have anything to do in the financial sector besides my sagging 401k. But this is what "they" want right? A cooldown in the economy so that inflation abates. As people are losing their jobs in the tech sector and goods are more expensive, a new computer purchase seems like a luxury. This TSMC miss and Apple's sales plunge earlier is expected right? What's next? Cars? Homes?

Car sales are in the toilet. Cars are sitting on dealer lots because they are too expensive and now banks are pulling floorplans. Car dealerships finance their inventory through banks, and these are called floorplans, in case anyone was wondering what a floorplan is.

Housing market in the last two states I lived in still see strong sales, but the transaction prices are down 10-11% from last fall.

I don't know what Nvidia's sales figures are like, but I can't imagine they are very good. Here, a base model RTX is $515 with tax. Base model cards like this were less than $200 4 years ago. What used to be a mid-range performance card now costs $1200.

People say housing prices are down but the lack of inventory is driving it back up. No one wants to sell and get a mortgage that could be double or almost triple their existing rate.

2 houses in my neighborhood sold for around $50k over asking. My neighbors are moving to another state and had 5 bids.

Both were almost $75-100k over Zillows estimate, which was quickly updated almost immediately based on the asking price.

In some markets, the last 2-3 years of price increases put a LOT of folks over the $250,000 (x2 for married couples) gains deduction. I wonder how many folks are hesitant to sell at a price that'll cost a serious amount of taxes if they're going to end up buying a new overpriced house anyway. Folks in major metro areas could see some serious costs due to those taxes.

I would bet most people across the US are not going to hit the 250k or 500k mark. How much more is it 5%? I’m not sure, 5% of 500k is only $25k more in taxes.

I don’t have enough time to parse this data but it is very interesting to me that my state’s home prices has increased 2% more than California since 1991.

https://advisor.visualcapitalist.com/growth-in-u-s-house-pri...

I'm not convinced by this argument - presumably the people sitting on houses are also not buying houses, so unless they mostly would be downsizing, the lack of supply should be matched by a lack of demand. Though this does mean a lack of liquidity in the market (in the general sense of lack of trading), so maybe prices are 'sticky' or find their correct supply vs demand level in jolts.

If car sales are so bad why are prices so crazy? I’ve been putting off buying a new car for two+ years and everything is completely insane or impossible to buy.

Materials costs are high. Transport costs were high. Loans and rents that underscore the business are high.

And because they can afford to sit on cars for 3-6-12 months; it's not like apples where they'll rot. Eventually they'll have to make space for next year's model but keep the price high and then negotiate.

> And because they can afford to sit on cars for 3-6-12 months

That's the question though. Can they? There's a carrying cost to all that inventory on the lot.

Thanks for explaining what floorplans are. What does it mean for a bank to "pull" a floorplan?

It just means they're not going to pay to float the cost of the car from the manufacturer. iirc the dealers "buy" the cars from the manufacturer, then resell them to the customers. In the interim, they must carry this floating debt while the unsold cars sit on the lot. This is often why you can cut great deals on cars they want to get out of their inventory: it's often better for them to take the principle hit instead of letting the car rack up more interest payments on the floorplan or take a sizable principle hit in a wholesale auction.

Does this mean that rising Fed benchmark interest rates affect car dealers in a few ways?

1) The economy is in an iffy position, so customers don't want to make big purchases.

2) Even if customers are willing to buy, car financing rates are higher so they'd be reluctant to pay a higher interest rate.

3) Cars stay longer on the lot, meaning a longer duration of interest payments.

4) The interest rates the dealer pays to the bank increase, too.

You got it, but also add: likely dealer bankruptcies because the overhead is absolutely bonkers (and is often required by brands to set up a dealership; every brand wants a bunch of air-conditioned space to show off their new models!).

This is also why you should never take your car to the dealer service center if possible. They try to rip you off so hard (and underpay their service techs) because they truly don't make that much money off each car (at least before the covid boom season, but as we see that is reverting HARD).

In this case, it means either stopping financing floorplans altogether or greatly curtailing how much they will finance.

There are conflicting signals. On the one hand, the rates are climbing so it is genuinely easier to park your money in something tangible if you think inflation is not going to be tamed easily. If that is a prevailing view, then some rush to pick any remaining inventory for non-perishable goods will be strong and keep the prices stable or rising ( housing in metro areas is a good example, where sales indicate stubborn price rigidity ).

Agreed on cars ( I just financed one ). I clearly could have pushed more just based on that. I am mildly annoyed with myself.

Used car prices have stopped increasing, but are very elevated from pre-covid: https://publish.manheim.com/content/dam/consulting/ManheimUs...

Prices are driven up by people’s inability to be financial savvy.

People keep overpaying for things like cars and houses. Any drop in prices by few % makes it look like a great deal, and people fomo into it; when in fact prices are still insanely high and completely disconnected from the real economy.

More and more people will be house poor. Many ex-FAANG bought into $8k mortgage depleting a good chunk of their saving for insane downpayment, thinking their income would go on for the next 30y.

I believe we will start see the effect of this in the coming years.

There is no way around it, people must stop buying and stop paying $5 for a coffe.

What if the neutral state of affairs has full of people who are not financially savvy? Maybe, we are in that state.

Recently I came up with a list of 15 reasons why gasoline car sales are going to plummet in the next few years. I'm sure that I'll be wrong on a few of the fifteen, but even so it's hard to see anything but doom for anybody selling gasoline cars. Electric cars are only partially going to make up the difference, and that's only if you can make them at a profit in a time of rapidly falling prices and constrained material supply....

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35371171

In an inflationary environment, prices exceed the ability of people to pay and dollar velocity falls which puts downward pressure on prices. At least that sometimes happens. Other times, governments, banks, megacorps and other institutions turn on the liquidity and people just start using a million of the local currency unit to buy bread. Which way things go today will depend upon whether or not the Federal Reserve and the US govt find a way for the govt to avoid a sovereign debt crisis.

> people are losing their jobs in the tech sector

Want to point out that this continues to be limited to tech, with national unemployment continuing to tick down amidst job creation.

>> with national unemployment continuing to tick down amidst job creation.

There is alot of problems with this metric. First and foremost as that we need to redefine what "unemployment" means, as there are alot of people unemployed that do not count in that metric and conversely some employed people that are counted as unemployed.

The changing types of work (gig economy, etc) need to change how we count things.

Further Decreases in high paying jobs while creating low paying jobs does not seem like it should be something to be celebrated or pointed to as a robust economic activity, in short not all jobs are created equal

You’ve listed unquantified hypotheticals, all of which are refuted by the data. For example:

> we need to redefine what "unemployment" means, as there are alot of people unemployed that do not count in that metric and conversely some employed people that are counted as unemployed

We have a variety of statistics measuring each of these [1] as well as no single unemployment figure. They’re all not only good, but improving.

> changing types of work (gig economy, etc) need to change how we count things

Part time versus full time has always been measured.

> Decreases in high paying jobs while creating low paying jobs

Real median wages have risen over the last year, are flat to Q4 2019 and at an all-time high exempting Q4 2019 - 2021 [2]. The pain is concentrated in tech, and at big tech at that.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q#

Employment-population ratio is probably the one hardest to game, and it is not slowing down at all. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060

Ideally! It’s a great time for those with high amounts of wealth to buy up assets from those suffering from inflation. Cheaper stocks, people losing their homes due to unemployment, business going under, etc.

Are people really losing their homes? 2022 is still down from pre-pandemic levels. 2020 and 2021 are outliers because of eviction bans.

https://www.attomdata.com/news/market-trends/foreclosures/at...

That's one of the reasons they do this. Largest companies get to consolidate further.

"They" being the Federal Reserve, who's mandate is to balance unemployment and inflation. So yes, Cars, homes and everything else in the Fed's basket of goods needs to stop going up by 6%/mo. The Fed is limited in their toolset, so in order to do that they can raise the federal funds rate basically causing any loans given to have a minimum APR (Why lend to Jack for 5%, when Uncle Sam will give you 6%). So if you're taking out a loan, your payments are going to be more expensive. Thats going to nuke lower return investments and make borrowing to grow your business harder.

> The Fed is limited in their toolset, so in order to do that they can raise the federal funds rate basically causing any loans given to have a minimum APR

The Fed is limited much the way a surgeon would be limited if they had to manage a tumor with a mallet.

The solution here would've been targeted taxes to extract the excess liquidity that pooled up in the economy after all the loans and grants, but with a deadlocked legislature this was not going to happen. So, mallet it was.

Why is the answer often to raise taxes? Wouldn't less government spending and a higher fed rate have been even better and more efficient?

Inflation was already high when the last large spending package passed and succeeded in over stimulating the economy.

Getting agreement on reducing spending is a much harder ask. What are you going to cut? The military? They're incredibly well connected, it's basically impossible. Social Security? Old people vote, it's political suicide. Social Safety Net programs? Already been cut to the bone.

It's also questionable how much of inflation is due to supply shock versus how much is just corporate profit taking. Corporate profit margins have been incredibly healthy despite what is supposedly a supplier squeeze.

You're right, it's way easier for the government to spend money it doesn't have. The end game on that path isn't pretty.

But that's not my question or point, and maybe I didn't write my other post very well.

The post I'm replying to suggests more taxes should have been used to suck up the excess liquidity. I'm suggesting that liquidity was caused by too many large spending packages and Fed rates that were too low in the first place... Hence, it might be inefficient.

Of course I'm biased, as my spending power has gone down tremendously in the past 1.5 years. I blame the large increases in money supply and low Fed rate for causing a wild near-free money environment.

> Inflation was already high when the last large spending package passed and succeeded in over stimulating the economy.

The others answered you pretty well. My comment speaks instead to this recital, which is incorrect and thus undermines the rest of your argument.

Inflation in the US was averaging around 2% since 2008 (https://www.worlddata.info/america/usa/inflation-rates.php), and 2% is generally considered healthy (https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/5D58E72F066A4DBDA80BBA65...).

"less government spending" doesn't address the pooled-up liquidity in the economy; it just addresses government spending. Hence the need for the scalpel (finely targeted taxes)... or in the absence of such, the blunt instrument (broadly-impactful rates).

They both extract money, but one's specific to things such as luxury goods, gas-powered vehicles over a certain weight, homes over a certain size or cost relative to local income, a tax per stock trade, whatever makes sense, whereas the other... not so much. Targeted taxes without an increase in spending would result in a net reduction in the budget deficit or even potentially a budget surplus, which then is essentially how the money is removed from circulation. And without using the mallet, businesses can continue to grow in a cheap-money environment.

I'm not an economist; I've just absorbed a lot from working in FIs in the past. But there's probably an economist here who can affirm or debunk what I just put forward.

I earned a degree in economics, business & management.. But it doesn't matter much.

Re-reading my post, it looks like I could have written it better.

I was referring to the stimulus spending, in particular the last one or two huge packages. It might have been more efficient to not do them in the first place. At the time many economists were very concerned about the overall effects on the economy. We were already running at 5+% annualized inflation, right?

I understand the general ideas behind Modern Monetary Theory, that it looks like you and the original post are referring to. Wild spending corrected by surgical taxation...

MMT sounds great in academic papers, but it runs into problems in practice. We can't just raise taxes wherever and whenever we want. There are too many problems to list with attempting to do that, from the lobbyists, to officials wanting to get reelected, to the errors of misidentifying where the taxes are to be applied. Not to mention all the existing laws around taxing.

It's expensive to send out a bunch of money, and then tax it back... I suggest that it's more efficient to spend less. But I realize there is a fat chance of that ever happening!

Seems you're commenting more on the feasibility of surgical taxes rather than the effectiveness of them.

Which is fine; no disagreement there from me. But I'd also posit that government spending on the administrivia is a positive - it's yet another way to keep money moving and likewise keep momentum in the economy.

I guess my point is: the ideal would've been to surgically tax money out of the system, but since we can't (for all the reasons you and I both mentioned), the alternative was rates. And while I hear your point re: cutting spending, you're arguing its merits on the likelihood of it happening, not so much whether one's better than the other. And neither spending cuts nor surgical tax hikes would happen anyway, hence...

...rates. lol

tl;dr: we're saying the same thing. You're talking about which one's more feasible, I'm talking about which one would've probably been more ideal to maintain momentum.

Which party has voted for consequential spending cuts in the last two decades?

> Why is the answer often to raise taxes?

Because taxing isn't a way to fund the government, it's a way to shape behavior.

You can say the exact same thing about spending... Subsidies and stimuli shape behavior.

> 6%/mo

Come again? We’re at 6% year over year, which is not even close to 6%/mo.

I assume they meant 6% annualized each month, so 1.06^(1/12) - 1 = 0.4868%.

To use startup lingo, it’s a 6% run rate.

If home values drop, central banks usually swoop in to ensure housing remains unaffordable.

> Apple's sales plunge

the overall PC market declined 29%

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pc-shipments-fall-29-led-by-dro...

Most people use their phones for day to day computing; that's the real "personal computer".

Laptops for things like web browsing and word processing haven't really improved in a meaningful way. Like my laptop from 4 years ago does just as fine a job as this year's model when it comes to browsing HN, running spotify, and managing ssh sessions to a cloud VM. Outside of gaming and some network simulation stuff for grad-school I have no need of a high-powered PC, and my i5 from a few years back still handles that well enough.

Frankly if I didn't need to for network sim and VMs I'd have ditched the PC for a basic laptop, and hit my gaming fix w/ a Switch or Playstation.

It's too bad the Samsung Dex-style computing never made it to Apple devices. Apple is loath to combine mouse and touch-based computing, though.

The iPad Magic Keyboard is a trackpad on a touch based os.

"Unfortunately" the jobs report in Canada came in strong, and, predictably, the US jobs report followed.... surprise surprise, just as strong. More pain ahead I suppose.

If that darned economy would just stop getting better, maybe the economy would finally get better.

This is one of the big dangers I see in economics right now. Too many people believe that a "strong job market" equals a strong economy. Boiling all economics down to the unemployment numbers is very dangerous

> expected right?

The market is currently pricing is that central banks will be pressured to stop increasing rates due political pressure and / or systemic risk triggers.

Bears / short sellers are actually losing money.

Karl Marx said capitalists gain profit by expropriating the wealth a worker creates during surplus labor time. There is a conflict in the relation of production between the worker creating the wealth and the heir seeking to expropriate it.

Feudal pre-capitalist society did not need unemployment, but capitalist society does, if there is no reserve army of labor ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour ), the workers creating wealth have more leverage to keep more of the wealth they created.

This is all happening because the rentier class is seeking to retain its rate of profit.

That's an odd analysis. The reason there was no unemployment was because labor's bargaining power was very low. Similar to how if minimum wage and social safety nets were removed, unemployment would drop significantly.

It's also a terrible idea to pin the responsibility on the current trend, rather than the many trillions of dollars printed over the past few decades (culminating in Covid), that were mostly handed to Wall Street and friends. That was an extreme concentration of wealth, pulled directly from the edges where people are stuck transacting/saving in dollars. The reason it's not glaringly apparent is that technlogical productivity improvements compensate for it.

Interest rates existing again is better viewed as a correction from the past few decades of misallocation. I agree that the centralizers will gain on this part of the cycle, as they do with every change. But rather than condemn the current conditions (thus setting the stage for another cycle of looting), we should aim to hold them as they are and let the economy rebalance to favoring some saving rather than pure immediate consumption - especially in light of needing more environmental sustainability.

> if minimum wage and social safety nets were removed, unemployment would drop significantly.

An unsupported assertion I'd suggest. However, I think we can definitely say that removing worker protections leads to worse life outcomes for the poorest - and perhaps the richest too if we factor in rising crime due to inequality (compare US and EU). It may also reduce the size of the economy, the few remaining rich people don't need to actually spend much in aggregate (there is only so much food, furniture, foreign holidays etc they can consume).

I wasn't saying that as if it would be a good thing. Just that it would be closer to historical conditions where people were desperate to eat, and could be paid very little due to that desperation.

The times were never easier for the laptop class to get self employed and leaving the hamster wheel.

(Besides,i noticed, that on HN, where a lot of people program machines to do the work for them, profiting from the productivity gains, have an affinity to quoting Marx. I do not know why that is.)

You're greatly overstating the pipeline in education, knowledge, attention, and effort that's required to get to that point. And to stay there.

If it were easy there wouldn't be corporations.

They never said it’s easy, just that it’s easier. That’s true.

(It's almost as if it's because they're able to differentiate between a machine and a human being.)

Marx said a lot of things and almost all of them were wrong.

Included in Marx's greatest hits are

"The most capitalist countries will be the first to fall to communism" when in reality the only two major countries to fall to communism were theocratic monarchies that it would be a struggle to call capitalist.

"After the dictatorship of the proletariat the organs of the state will naturally fade away." Yet everytime the proletariat gets into power it seems that the organs of the state only strengthen.

"I shouldn't have to work other people should pay for me to continue to live." It turns out Karl never had a job, and spent most of his life mooching off of others, exactly as he accused the capitalists of doing.

In fact everything Marx said that could be evaluated against reality turned out to be wrong, so why should I trust the rest of what he said?

>"The most capitalist countries will be the first to fall to communism" when in reality the only two major countries to fall to communism were theocratic monarchies that it would be a struggle to call capitalist.

Have you seen the trends the US is moving towards?

[1]:https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/sep/20/eat-the-ric...

I think you are writing off this quote too early. Also, the US has gone though this cycle before. When things got near the breaking point the elites threw some crumbs to the rest(eg. Social Security, Medicare).

>"After the dictatorship of the proletariat the organs of the state will naturally fade away." Yet everytime the proletariat gets into power it seems that the organs of the state only strengthen.

We've never really hit this point in the west because of reasons said above.

>"I shouldn't have to work other people should pay for me to continue to live." It turns out Karl never had a job, and spent most of his life mooching off of others, exactly as he accused the capitalists of doing.

You could argue Automation is paying capitalists elites to continue to live. Just spread more of that wealth around.

Lenin also said communism would be built in the West, not Russia. Circumstances allowed power to fall into the Bolsheviks hands and he decided to take it - to the surprise of Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev etc.

The second point follows from the first.

> the heir seeking to expropriate it

Capital owners all inherited their capital, I take it?

> Feudal pre-capitalist society did not need unemployment, but capitalist society does

The high productivity of capitalist societies plus technological advances mean that people can be unemployed without starving to death. Feudal societies did not need unemployment because everyone was working to the bones.

> the workers creating wealth have more leverage to keep more of the wealth they created

I encourage everyone to negotiate as much of their share as they can. But if the underlying thesis was true and capitalists provided no value and workers all of the value, then the world's best companies would be worker cooperatives. I see no evidence that this is the case.

Capitalist societies did more to improve the lives of everyone on Earth than Marxism ever did or ever could.

Have you walked the streets of Havana? I have. Talk about oppressive... And depressing.

Please, being under economic sanctions for longer than most people on this board have been alive has done more to damage Cuba than any kind of political/economic system could have ever managed. Especially given their main industry was tourism and agriculture. The rich Americans that poured dollars into Havana, were cut off along with the supply of manufactured goods, and being a resource poor island made it hard to build an industrial base.

Compared with their more capitalist neighbors who aren't doing great either, might point you to reasons why a whole region, which includes a resource rich continent have been struggling for the past couple hundred years. I will start you off with the wikipedia page on banana republic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic

Please! :) The Castro regime made the decision to seize any land from anyone with 50 acres or more. What sort of outcome did Fidel, Che, and Cienfuegos expect? Well, they expected to build thriving trade economy with the Soviets... whoops!

My point is Marxism/Socialism trades one form of oppression for another. Marxism fails to identify poor leadership as oppressive. Socialist systems are run by error prone leaders that crave power and fortune... They are the same people that run corporations under a different flag. Che was killed trying to overthrow another nation to put in Cuban friendly socialist leadership... How is that different from your banana example?

At least in capitalism we can vote with our dollars. We can spend our money on things we believe in. Not with socialism. Good luck finding choice or innovation that the state doesn't support. It literally crushes innovation.

Besides these arguments, what great things came from Marxism that we enjoy today?

I sorta think your conflating authoritarian socialism (aka communism) with democratic socialism which is as large a mistake as conflating pure democracy with corrupt representative democracy where a minority of the population is used to rubber stamp an oligarchy.

Similarly, capitalism in its purest forms is basically feudalism because the people won't have any dollars to vote with. And time and time again it seems the benevolent Henry Ford style capitalists are proven to be the minority. So, one might say that without the socialist scare in the late 1800's early 1900's which forced the hands of the capitalists all those quality of live improvements everyone likes to go on about probably wouldn't exist. We might all be working 80 hour weeks and scraping by in company hovels eating whatever gruel the company store gives us. But then again, a large portion of the US population is wildly unaware of how the bottom 30% live, while ignoring their own debt slavery. So enjoy your bread/circuses while the rich take an even larger slice of the economic pie.

edit: How about some George Carlin, RIP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyvxt1svxso

I love Carlin. Thanks

Perhaps you're changing the subject? My original post was in response to an invocation of Karl Marx, the father of Communism... as I understand it, Communism is about as authoritarian as it gets.

I mean an intermediate stage from Capitalism to Communism is called "Dictatorship of the proletariat"...

>At least in capitalism we can vote with our dollars. We can spend our money on things we believe in.

The end state of the current US capitalistic system is a rental economy where "you'll own nothing and be happy"(WEF terminology, not mine). We are seeing this in the loss of the ability to buy real estate but also in the push to move towards a subscription model for everything. Subscription cars vs ownership, subscription services vs ownership, even subscriptions for hardware such that you rent hardware for a monthly fee and "trade up" every other year. Capital has exhausted every other avenue for growth so this is what is left. Combine that with wage stagnation and inflation eating away what little value is left. How is it possible to follow your plan in the world?

The end state of socialism and communism is also "you'll own nothing and be happy". All political/economic systems suffer from corruption and abuse of power at the top. The only difference is the ability for the masses to control their own destiny. Market economies give them a little, control economies give them none.

True, yeah both extremes suck. My optimistic hope is that the US self corrects to something like what the European countries have: a flavor of Democratic Socialism. Right now its not looking good, the US is moving further to extreme capitalism with no real end in sight.

Capitalists seem to be fighting a losing battle. Birth rates will not recover until possibly once Gen Alpha comes online. Thats ~20 years from now.

And thats a big IF the elites convince millennials to bear kids en-mass(heard about people like Elon and neoliberals like Peter Zeihan pushing people to have kids?).

Frankly I don't see it happening unless millenials really start getting some more stability. Seems like the new "kids" are actually dogs/cats. Who knows? Maybe the Millenials that are inheriting their parents houses/the ones who became successful in tech early will make up the shortfall for the rest of the generation.

At the same time oldest millenials are turning ~40 now so if they haven't had kids time is running out. Clock is ticking.

Anyone comparing sales/growth/general economic measurements from COVID until now is running a fool's errand. Compare metrics w/Fall of '19 and use the average from the past decade to really gain insight.

https://archive.ph/5MrBJ

Same as with Apple sales. It's a return to the mean. Pandemic caused a huge rush in sales in this sector. Now it's just slowing down to normal. Doesn't mean the market isn't growing, simply that it's growing slower.

Which sales? iPhone unit sales were flat the last 5 or 6 years...Mac sales too. Their service revenues started declining 12 months ago...

They took advantage of being able to charge higher prices, but they certainly didn't do it on increased volume.

The average pleb can't afford a new iPhone. Employment is high but salaries are stagnant, meaning that people are struggling to afford basics. iPhone ain't ranking that high, esp. when you can get reasonably good Android alternatives for cheaper.

They can't afford one, doesn't mean they don't have one though. Salaries are stagnent compared to inflation yes...but thats average. If you look at the huge amount of retirees that exited the workforce over the past 2 years and factor in the bump that means everyone else got (to stay "flat") it means many people have more money than they did even when compared to inflation.

For renters it's worse, but those who own homes that bought more than 2 years ago they are in a good situation because their largest monthly payment probably hasn't changed significantly.

Meanwhile AMD/Xilinx still havent returned to manufacturing same volume of older designs like Spartan6 as they did before pandemic. What used to be $4 chips are now selling for $40. Why order new batch when we can manufacture 10x less and charge 10x more funneling our clients to never more expensive SKUs?

A surprisingly large fraction of TSMC output a couple years ago was going to bitcoin mining ASIC's. I wonder if that is still happening.

So, looks like semiconductor companies weren't organized enough to avoid the down-cycle of the bullwhip effect.

Not really...this bullwhip is not really created by customers but by each step of the supply chain increasing inventories as the supply chains had issues and it's not something you can just be organized about and avoid. Not to mention when you see slowdowns at the supplier/manufacturing side the cycle time of products gets faster so the industry customers can delay ordering...just causes a super drop off in production but it should be short lived.

By 2020, when production felt, prices rose and semiconductor profits got into unprecedented levels, there was a lot of speculation on whether it would destroy a lot of companies.

It is starting to look like the doom predictions were the correct ones. The drop-off is sustaining itself for a while already.

Anyway, the US intervention on the economy being extremely pro-cyclic for the semiconductor industry certainly didn't help.

Semiconductors used to be very cyclic...pre-2008. I would say demand has been extremely strong across most semiconductor products for at least the last 15 years now...with no real drop except maybe a tick in 2019 right before COVID hit.

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