This whole economy by corruption and coercion is not going to work out.
> investing a further $400 billion in the US alongside buying a stake in Intel seems improbable from a purely financial standpoint
TSMC's entire assets are ~$200,000,000,000 [1] (cash, inventory, accounts receivable, land, buildings and equipment.)
Buying 49% of Intel ... maybe. Intel's outstanding Market Cap is current ~$88,600,000,000. (4,377,000,000 outstanding shares [2] @ 20.26 8/5/25 midday price [3]). Double TSMC's entire assets is a bit extreme.
Notably, Intel's valuation also seems kind of nonsense. They made $13B in revenue last quarter. 2024 yearly was $53B ... on a market cap of $88B? Intel's been a mess lately, yet their valuation's also kind of a mess. If they ever stop bleeding money on operating profit and net income they won't look that bad.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC
[2] https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/intc/instituti...
Or the entire thing can be done by a stock swap, with whoever diluting themselves however amount is necessary, etc.
I think our lives are short enough that it can be easy to perceive something like America as “always was, always will be” and the rest is just trivia you learn in history class.
It feels to me like it's more like the beginning of an empire, in the sense of existing under an emperor.
> I think our lives are short enough that it can be easy to perceive something like America as “always was, always will be” and the rest is just trivia you learn in history class.
I think it very interesting that one of the things the USA is going to have to grapple with, in the middle of the most contentious presidency in its history, is the semiquincentennial of independence itself.
The bicentennial of independence in 1976 was I think largely an uncontentious thing even though the Vietnam conflict had ended only a couple of years beforehand and the presidency was in the hands of a guy who had taken over the job from, and pardoned, a crook who was forced to resign. Internationally people were pretty kind and generous to the USA.
I don't think anyone, anywhere on the planet, is prepared diplomatically for how it will play out this time. Next year is going to be a heck of a year.
What I mean about the beginning of an empire is, as I said -- the beginning of a true individual, not simply unitary, emperor. That the executive is transforming into l'état, c'est moi, which no US president has had the luxury of ever before, because Congress wouldn't ever have handed over the influence and authority they had.
So in the end your assessment is probably correct. It's probably going to be a long, slow decline though.
It happened before, and perhaps even worse (more competent people were corrupt).
Now, people are just making it public.
If suddenly corruption is done in the open, you see it more, and think it may be because the total amount is greater, but it is only more visible.
We don't know how much historical corruption was invisible, thus it is hard to accurately say there is more.
Plus, china kept at bay, peace increased, intel's bad management gets to bail out saving face, TSMC gets rewarded for their hard work, Trump gets a win, Intel's employees get better management, and get rich from their stock options winning hugely....
Capitalism is where everyone wins like this.
Even china, because china loses if it goes to war, but china feels it has to go to war.
Why else has the US been overspending on military for decades and planting military bases and nuclear submarines all over the world, to become the world hegemony, if not to bully everyone in doing its bidding when push comes to shove?
I'm not defending the actions of the US, I'm just asking what are the other countries gonna do about it? Ally with Cuba, China, Iran and Russia to fight the US? Unlikely.
UK, Canada, Australia, New Zeeland are 5 eyes members and therefore lapdogs of the US, and the EU as much as they dislike the US due to Trump, has a laundry list of urgent domestic issues like Russia, no cheap energy, no high growth industry like tech, ageing population, economic stagnation or even decline, collapsing welfare and pension system, illegal immigration leading to a rise right wing extremism leading to crackdowns on freedom of speech and censorship leading to further social and political turmoil. So how is the EU gonna retaliate when they can't even keep themselves together?
What can they do now, when the US holds all the cards? Their only hope can be that the US collapses from internal issues, just like the Roman empire, but until then, they literally have no screws to turn on the US and just like the EU, Switzerland, etc, are forced to accept the terms of the US or have their already fragile economies suffer even more.
They already are. The US defence industry buys from them no matter what. Which is why the US needs to ensure their survival. The concern isn't that Intel survives or not (the US would prop them up no matter what), but that they also remain on the cutting edge and the US doesn't lose out if, say, Taiwan falls to China.
The US doesn't need to be cut out of world trade altogether (it won't be obviously) to lose a lot at the margin, with the chief beneficiaries ironically being the country the current US administration most hate...
Maybe I'm not understanding what you mean by a broad trade deal? As of 2023, a large majority of imports from the US and close to a majority of imports from China were tariff-free. (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...) The remainder are on goods that the EU doesn't want entirely free trade in for some reason or another. I could definitely imagine a scenario where China follows in Trump's footsteps and bullies the EU into pushing their tariff-free percentage higher, but I wouldn't call that broad and wouldn't expect it to produce radical shifts in the import-export activity of EU businesses.
- Europe signing trade deal with US
- China: We can’t afford for Russia to lose Ukraine war https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-cannot-lose-war-ukraine-09.... In other words, China is attacking Europe via Russia.
- China is in a great depression. Their only economic engine is export, and Europe is steadily putting up tariff walls.
That's not the roadmap to good management of anything, as literally anyone who has ever worked a job will tell you. How people can see an amalgamation of all the traits they despise in a peer or leader that they actually have to interact with, and go 'oh yeah this guy should be running the entire country, this will end well' is mindblowing.
The empire can run on fumes and momentum... for a while. No company or country is so exceptional that it can survive enough mismanagement, eventually you burn through the furniture, and piss away whatever lead or competency you had.
The 90s were ~30 years ago. American economic and military capacity ain't what they used to be, and alienating your allies and friends is starting to look like a poor strategy.
You're totally wrong about this when you look at the numbers. EU's economy was on par with the US about 20 years ago. Now it's only half the size of the US.
More prosaically, in the short term: TSMC are now effectively compelled to acquire Intel entirely or at least a controlling share, right?
Unless Trump's shakedown requires them to own 49% but then bans them from owning more than 50%, which would be the end of the USA as any sort of free market -- and I concede that is possible, because the USA now has a leader who acts more and more like an autocrat -- aren't TSMC essentially compelled by their own interests to find the just-greater-than 1% somewhere?
If you're blackmailing me into owning almost all of something but not getting control of what I owned, I think the logical next step is to forcibly gain control, yes? Because it turns the tables.
Not least because acquiescing even to buying 49% paints a target on my back.
Trump is not saving Intel: he is guaranteeing it is going to get broken up and sold off. He is destroying it. (More to the point he is immediately tying its existence to the success or failure of his own Asia-facing foreign policy, which means he is effectively asserting control over it)
Otherwise I fully agree with you, this will definitely not work out in the long run, but who cares about the long run anymore in this day and age?
The other important thing about this is that it dirties Intel almost immediately with presidential cheeto dust. So the value is going to fall over the long term, and this isn't the last sell-off they will have to do. Can you stop TSMC or a stalking horse for TSMC buying up parts of the rest?
Trump has created a powerful victim here.
I'd imagine they would be happy to have TSMC still selling to NVidia, Apple and AMD, and therefore a powerful lever in case of future US export controls/etc.
Obviously a protracted or nasty war would have a severe impact, but it's hard to see why China would want to harm TSMC, even if worse case for US they stopped them from exporting.
it's not about what China wants, it's just not feasible to operate a fab in a warzone
Though from the POV of economic coercion, the question is probably more like "what's the USA's import/export market like relative to all my markets including domestic?", which is going to vary wildly by industry.
> Ally with China, Iran and Russia to fight the US?
Replace Iran with the EU, and yes, some or all of them.
> EU as much as they dislike the US, has a laundry list of urgent domestic issues like Russia,
Urgent, but affordable.
> no cheap energy, no tech industry,
Energy isn't meaningfully worse than anyone else, lots of tech but it's mostly local rather than global in scale
> ageing population, economic stagnation or even decline,
Like everyone else, including the USA
> collapsing welfare system
News to me. Also: Wasn't the USA's supposed to collapsing since Obama took power?
But also, not a unified welfare system over all member nations of the EU.
> illegal immigration leading to a rise right wing extremism leading to crackdowns on freedom of speech and censorship.
Is it, or is that a narrative? And specifically, is it doing this worse than the USA today?
The mean wealth/income per person in the USA is indeed higher than China.
So what?
US was all into destroying Afghanistan and Iraq. They had no intention of being there long term.
Can’t it be both? It’s hard to argue they aren’t trying to destroy it. It has been attempted in the past during the Holodomor.
Russia's end goal here is a cultural genocide.
People love to cry foul when the US flexes it's might... then cry foul when the US takes a back seat... literally cry foul no matter what the US does.
If Ukraine is so important to the world order, why has Europe (you know, Ukraine's actual neighbors) not stepped up with their full military power? Why is Europe not threatening troops, missiles, aircraft, tanks, etc... even nuclear obliteration if Putin doesn't yield? Why is it the US has to swoop in, from half a world away, and save the day (again, and again, and again...)?
The US is not currently willing to send our citizens to die in Ukraine. Maybe Europeans should?
The US is currently not wanting Ukraine to win for a single reason - it’s personal to Trump. So much has happened that we’ve collectively forgotten that it was Zelensky said “No” to Trump on the phone when wanting to find any dirt on Joe Biden helping Hunter in business deals.
That totally explains why Biden kept slow-walking support packages...
It certainly will when Putin moves on to invading Poland or Finland. The whole point of holding the line at Ukraine is because everyone believes Putin won’t stop there.
"Putin is too sensible to invade Ukraine" was the argument people were making the day before he did. My guess is these are the same people who now say "Putin would never invade Poland".
Never been to Finland so no opinion on that.
Article 5 of NATO (an attack on one is an attack on all) has only been invoked once, by the US. So why did NATO members send their militaries to Afghanistan?
The real reason is that most conflicts never happen. Or are resolved before ending in a full war. Either the US or a European NATO country sending in troops would muddy the conflict so much that the risk of escalation is huge.
There's a difference between the US invading Iraq and US aiding a country being invaded.
Why can't the Germans send troops into Ukraine? Or the Brits (for all their grandstanding and bluster)?
Why must it be the US?
If "everyone" thinks Putin isn't going to stop with Ukraine, then it would seem Europe has an existential crisis to deal with - not the US, thousands of miles away...
Two reasons:
1. Because whichever country does go in, it gives everyone else in NATO an excuse to do nothing in response to Russia subsequently going to full war with whoever it was that went in. Strategic vs tactical response in local political sphere, short-term tactical benefit of using such an excuse comes at long term strategic cost.
2. Right now, each individual European power is in a state of "Oh no, Russia's probably 3-5 years away from attacking us if Ukraine falls, and it will take us 5-8 years to be ready to defend ourselves". The UK, for example, has a 136k active and 32k reserve personnel in total, while Ukraine forces have suffered ~400k wounded and ~50-100k fatalities.
Both points become "we can only intervene directly as a joint act from multiple nations".
That said, if the USA were to leave NATO, I wouldn't be overly surprised if rest of NATO may issue a joint declaration that Ukraine is now under their combined protection, nor would I be overly surprised by an alternative outcome such as NATO being functionally replaced with Article 42 of the Treaty on European Union: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A...
And also, much of Europe is, in fact, sending aid (and arms) to Ukraine. All the other stuff is about troops on the ground.
Even a non-nuclear direct conventional war would get very messy very quickly. NATO would have to seize Kaliningrad and Belarus, start interning Russian nationals, rush forces to hold the Baltic states, and so on. It's not complicated to say "this will be very expensive and deadly, so we're not going to do it unless absolutely forced to".
European states are now re-arming (the irony of fate is that it's now US policy for Germany and Japan to re-arm), but that is going to take a while.
If Putin wins in Ukraine, it will show everyone that the US is incapable to hold even a weak enemy such as Russia to account. It is irrelvant that you frame it as a choice rather than a failure.
Europe has been doing more than the US in absolute and relative terms to prop up Ukraine but it hasn't been enough to help Ukraine win. As a European, I would want our governments to put soldiers down and end the war, but Russia has been successful in the information war to make too many citizens afraid to enter with troops.
The US hasn't been saving the day for anyone without ulterior motives for a long time (ever?). You make it seem like it were generous moves to counter mostly Russia or e.g. ensure access to middle eastern oil.
The US has never spend money on its allies which it didn't believe has a large return. So the current Republican administration's view to reduce engagement is actually hurting themselves. Classic lose-lose.
"Peacekeepers" is obviously meaningless when there is no peace to keep, so the question is what happens when NATO troops attack Russian troops directly.
But if the US had a different objectives, every human settlement in Afghanistan could have have been radioactive ash by September 12, 2001. Or, more realistically, the US could have gone in, killed all (for some value of all) the local elites as a warning to leaders elsewhere about the costs of harboring terrorists, and then immediately left the country in the same sort of chaos that they eventually did a couple of decades later. Kabul delenda est was always accomplishable.
The only people who should be ashamed of the their performance in Ukraine are the Russians, and the Europeans, for failing to be able deter or respond to the Russia on their own despite having an economy five times the size.
US interests are perfectly well served by seeing the Russian military mauled for a generation at the cost of aid, much of it material that was going to be decommissioned anyway, that costs roughly what Americans spend on golf in a given year (Once you throw in the costs of drinks on the 19th hole.)
Anyway, US arms sales are up since the start of the conflict, Russian sales have cratered.
If anything, it shows the opposite of what you are saying.
Negotiate and follow through in bad faith, because there's no upside to acting in good faith when the opposing party is pursuing a lose-lose agenda.
I don't think becoming China would be a success.
Are you saying there’s something different this time ?
But consider who in the world really loves the British. You don't need much time to make a list. Or even a paper and pen.
The main difference between the British Empire and the American Empire is that the American Empire is being led by a man who believes tariffs are a tax on foreign countries and retail prices can be cut by more than 100% and remain positive.
I've missed this story. Can you elaborate?
- this is his wonky understanding (and he is pretty famously innumerate)
- he's saying it as a power game despite the pushback because people around him feel they have to smile, agree and retcon stuff to make it believable
Or indeed both.
(I haven't yet heard them make the claim that he means reversing gains, but I would expect them to. Heck if it was my job to make his Truth Social messages make sense, that is what I would say.)
But honestly his grasp of fractions and percentages has long been known to be worse than early era ChatGPT.
The most worrying aspect of the Trump era for the markets should be that he treats numbers as entirely flexible according to his mood, when the market needs them to at least be consistent.
But then they knew this before he was elected the first time; he is famous for admitting he assesses the value of future business at any time based in part on how he feels about it (which is reminiscent of the way Musk assesses future valuations, future delivery dates for full-self-driving, future sales of robots etc.)
So it's not a political thing at all. He hasn't always been a Republican but he has always been like this with numbers, and anyone who has ever subjected his words to any kind of scrutiny should know it.
The longer Trump creates a legal black hole carve-out for Tiktok, the less anyone will want to buy it. Because he is and this action is transparently corrupt, and it taints the buyer.
And that is true of the participants of any of these forced transfers; they paint targets on their back for future manipulation by the Trump executive. (Which increasingly feels like it should be described as a regime)