A lengthy Global Times article today on Taiwan’s economic recession reveals the United States looting Taiwan’s economy just as it is looting European nations and Germany in particular, with the Biden Administration’s policy of trying to destroy Russia and suppress China economically.
Export-oriented Taiwan’s economic contraction in the first quarter of 2023 was large—3.02%—and it is contracting again in the second quarter. It has had an economy driven by very large trade volumes with the rest of China ($320 billion in 2022, accounting for 40% of the island’s economy, with a trade surplus with the mainland of well over $100 billion). Since the Biden Administration declared “chips war” against China in February, with Taiwan’s TSMC Corp. as the main “prize,” that trade has shrunk, since TSMC’s biggest market was mainland China. On May 19, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Corp. revealed that it had completely abandoned its capital stake in TSMC.
In the same period, some 500 skilled employees of TSMC were persuaded to leave its workforce and move to the American Southwest to lead the staffing of a major new TSMC “fab” in Arizona. That “fab” is now delayed until at least 2025 due to shortages of skilled American hardware and software engineers to work with the Taiwan Chinese. The United States in 2023 is becoming TSMC’s largest revenue source, in place of mainland China, which market it is losing to mainland competitors, as is the case with U.S.-based semiconductor leaders like Nvidia.
Global Times makes a strong case that “The U.S. is trying to pull Taiwan region into the U.S.-led economic and technological standards system, fully control Taiwan’s economic industries, and make Taiwan unconditionally dependent on the U.S.” (https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202308/1295712.shtml)
In Germany, Green Party Economics and Climate Minister Robert Habeck, in an interview with the ARD broadcaster July 26, admitted the deindustrialization of Europe’s industrial powerhouse, but of course would not blame the U.S. master in NATO. “Tough years of green industrial transition will put a burden on German people,” Habeck said, forecasting “five tough years.” Habeck said the German government should borrow to subsidize energy and other extraordinary costs of NATO’s war for companies, “so that they can withstand the challenges of the transformation and have enough money to invest. The question is: Do we borrow money or do we no longer have industry? We don’t have much time left, otherwise companies will say: ‘We’ll invest, but no longer in Germany.’”
Habeck acknowledged to ARD that the government coalition does not have the votes for such subsidies, which are not backed by the SPD’s Olaf Scholz. (https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-economy-minister-robert-habeck-recession-energy-subsidies/)
