Comment by caseyy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by caseyy | Hacker News Reader

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The 90s Asian economic crisis was when we should have learned that the greedy Western speculative investment practices do not work without public bailouts. And yet somehow we all said “Korea is just not western enough” at that time.

What’s the excuse now, I wonder. West is not western enough? America not American enough? Is it that it’s not been made great again yet? No, our economy collapsing is the immigrants fault! Or maybe it’s the far right! It could be anything and anyone, so long as it’s not the unethical capitalism. How dare I even suggest that capitalism can be anything but perfect. Maybe I’m the problem.

This the great American distraction. In reality, it is just a number of self-serving executives grifting society. Parasites so attached to the host that it fears removing them. If we just appease the parasites this one more time, do one more bailout, surely things will only get better, right?

Dafuq?

All I'm saying is, if Samsung Electronics (SK), SK Hynix (SK), TSMC (Taiwan), UMC (Taiwan), PSMC (Taiwan), Nikon (Japan), and Canon (Japan) can remain private sector conglomerates that are subsidized by public financing, then why can't Intel, Micron, etc?

To this day, state-owned banks like KDB Bank (SK), EXIM ROC (Taiwan), DBJ (Japan), and JFC (Japan) continue to furnish a significant amount of capital to a handful of private sector players no matter what at 0.8-1% rates when market rate is around 1.5-2%.

Why shouldn't the US also provide similar preferential financing to private sector players?

I think American capitalist doctrine shoots itself in the foot here. Shareholder return above all else means that most of that public money wouldn't be used to develop corporate infrastructure or capability. It would probably disappear into sick projects and dividends. Companies don't want to develop liabilities that they'll have to maintain after the public money dries up.

This "capitalist doctrine" of shareholder return is alive and well in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Take a look at KOPSI or Nikkei sometime.

The main difference is the government steps in to subsidize (or "bail out") private sector enterprises, and continues to provide preferential treatment for large conglomerates at the expense of SMEs.

Industries like semiconductors and aerospace are very low margin, which makes commodified production extremely expensive because you are operating barely above break-even.

Unlike the countries listed above, the US did not provide similar subsidizes in the 1990s-2010s for these industries, which is what lead to the collapse of the semiconductor industry in the US by the 2010s.

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