xiaohongshu [none/use name]

Niger orders three Chinese oil officials out of country, sources say

NIAMEY, March 14 (Reuters) - Niger’s junta has ordered three Chinese officials working in the oil sector to leave the country, two sources familiar with the decision told Reuters on Friday, in the latest move by regional military governments to assert greater control over resources.

The request for the departure of the Niger-based directors of the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), the West African Oil Pipeline Company (WAPCo) and the joint venture oil refinery SORAZ was communicated Wednesday, the sources said.

The Chinese officials were given 48 hours to leave, and one source close to the government said on Friday they were out of the country.

The other source, who is close to the affected companies, said the directors were asked to leave because of disputes over pay for local staff and the pace of work on projects.

Separately, Niger’s tourism ministry last week rescinded the license for a Chinese-operated hotel in Niamey, citing discriminatory practices.

Spokespeople for the military junta, which took power in a coup in 2023, and the West African country’s oil ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

WAPCo and CNPC did not respond to requests for comment. SORAZ could not be reached for comment. Niger last year signed a memorandum of understanding with CNPC worth $400 million linked to the sale of crude oil from its Agadem oilfield.

The Niger junta has torn up defence agreements with the United States and former colonial power France. Authorities also took control of French nuclear fuels company Orano’s Somair uranium mine.

Military governments in Mali and Burkina Faso have similarly used legal disputes to assert greater control over resources including gold.

Niger is not playing around with its nationalization, it seems. After kicking the French out, they’re even kicking Chinese officials out wtf. At least try to re-negotiate or something.

On the topic of what China should be doing about Israel, this one has gone under the radar for obvious reasons: PowerChina Completes Israel’s Largest Pumped Storage Power Station

The Kokhav Hayarden Pumped Storage Power Station, constructed by Power Construction Corporation of China (PowerChina), has been officially commissioned for commercial operation. The project is the world’s lowest-altitude pumped storage power station and the largest of its kind in Israel.

As a key national infrastructure project in Israel, the power station is located in the Gilboa mountain range in northeastern Israel. It is also the first pumped storage project undertaken by a Chinese company overseas.

Designed with a total installed capacity of 344 megawatts, the station features upper and lower reservoirs, each with a storage capacity of 3.1 million cubic meters. Operating with a rated head of 410 meters, the facility is equipped with two reversible pump-turbine units, each with a capacity of 172 MW. Once operational, it will play a crucial role in ensuring the safety and stability of Israel’s power grid.

The project was executed under an engineering, procurement and construction contract, which was awarded to a consortium comprising PowerChina and General Electric Company.

China is exporting its state-of-the-art technology to help build Israel’s infrastructure. Maybe they should invite Israel to join Belt and Road as well.

Yes, and America repaid them by

1. forcing France to pay back their debt after WWI
2. gave Marshall Plan to Germany after their entire country was wrecked by Germany in WWII
3. gave France a token administrative role in the EEC (EU precursor) secondary to the industrial role of Germany
4. wrote a blank check to France by overprinting dollars during the Vietnam War, and when being demanded to pay in gold instead, Nixon abruptly ended the Bretton Woods and told the French to go shove themselves
5. invaded Iraq when Saddam wanted to sell oil to Europe in euro (Chevron was sued by the US for skirting sanctions)
6. tore up the 50 BILLION euro French-Australian submarine deal with AUKUS (France denied entry to the club) and forcing Australia to buy American submarines instead

In this clip, Elon Musk and Ted Cruz inadvertently discovered that what MMT has been saying all along is, in fact, true lol.

The Treasury simply orders the Fed to create new money out of nothing. The US government doesn’t need to tax before it can spend, nor does it need to “borrow” from private investors or foreign countries via bonds before it can spend.

I was hoping the Ukraine war would be the catalyst for such radical transformation, which would have fit into Xi’s broader approach towards suppressing private capital especially the financial economy (e.g. Alibaba’s Jack Ma).

For a while, if you remember back in the summer of 2022, there really seemed like something significant was going to happen. Russia canceled $23 billion of Africa’s debt in August 2022 amidst the sharp Fed rate hike, then China also waived the interest for its loans to a number of African countries.

Ultimately nothing really happened and it seems that China eventually did not want to get on board with the whole dedollarization plan (for reasons I’ve already stated) against Putin and Lula, the two BRICS member states who were calling for it.

It is difficult to predict what’s going to happen with the party, even under an economic crisis. The June 4th incident (aka Tiananmen Square incident) in 1989 demonstrated that the government would rather prioritize stability over chaos, even in the face of international media. The traumatic scars of Cultural Revolution still lingered. It should come as no surprise that many of the CPC leaders in the reform era have been victims of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

After the June 4th incident (which I remind you, started because of students protesting the loss of job guarantees after graduation as the industries were being privatized at the time), the party fractured into two opposing factions: the conservative hardliners (represented by Chen Yun) who wanted to stop the liberalization and turn back to the Maoist planned economy era, and the liberal reformists (represented by Deng Xiaoping) who insisted on resuming the liberalization of the economy.

Deng was driven into retirement after the June 4th incident (and mostly because he screwed up the 1988 price reform policy which led to inflation and the buildup towards the 1989 incident) and Jiang Zemin (Chen Yun’s protege) became the next General Secretary of the CPC. However, Jiang’s lifelong career at Jiangsu/Shanghai made his position relatively shaky up north at Beijing. Deng came out of his retirement during his infamous Southern Tour in 1992 and during one speech at Wuhan, he publicly stated that “anyone who opposes the reform will have to be stopped by any means necessary.” This culminated in the 1992 Zhuhai secret meeting where senior party officials and military generals secretly met with Deng without the authorization from Beijing, and Qiao Shi (Deng Xiaoping’s protege) was slated to replace Jiang Zemin if a coup was to proceed.

Jiang Zemin backed down, and the liberal reform was to proceed unperturbed. The ideologically fervent Marxists in the CPC were effectively out of power by the 1990s. When China joined the WTO in 2001, it was mostly a neoliberal fest. Xi is interesting in that he seemed to walk in between the two, seemingly trying to reverse the course of the neoliberal trajectory (it was either him or Bo Xilai, who was Jiang Zemin’s protege and arguably a more hardcore Marxist until his corruption scandal led to his downfall). Xi was heading the endeavor to stop the encroachment of private capital, especially financial companies, and most prominently when Jack Ma’s Alibaba was attempting to interfere with governmental policy making. But he may be fighting against very entrenched liberal factions at all levels of the government. The recent return of Jack Ma at the highest echelon meeting with the business leaders showed just how powerful the private sector has become.

So I cannot tell you what’s going to happen. In many ways, as someone who has tried to learn as much as possible about the party, it is still by and large a very opaque bureaucracy. Things may suddenly change for the better, or they could get worse without any notice.

It is ideological indoctrination but not just that - China has been the biggest beneficiary to dollar hegemony other than the US, and unfortunately often to the detriment to other Global South countries. So, decades of structuring your economy to rely heavily on export to rich Western countries and the scale of which unmatched by any other country before, also made it equally difficult to switch out of this mentality.

If things have been working well for so long, it can be very painful to get out of the comfort zone.

We commonly hear people say that China has been taking advantage of foreign capital to build its productive forces (and even Trump says openly that China taking advantage of US investments), but the inversion is equally true in this dialectical relationship: China has also been sucked into the global trade network constructed under the Washington-led neoliberal framework and arguably the country that has the most to lose if the dollar hegemony collapses (perhaps even more so than the US itself).

This is why China was unprepared for Trump’s trade war in 2018 and equally perplexed that Trump now wants to unilaterally end the global free trade that has been the pillar of US imperialism since the past century. We may soon witness an absurd situation where the US wants to de-globalize itself while China doing everything it can to maintain the dollar hegmony instead.

For Jia Genliang’s work, this policy paper would be a good read if you want to know more about the details of local government debt (luckily in English this time).

Yes, this is pretty much the same as the NPC work report that I posted the summary of ~2 weeks ago.

First of all, there is undeniably a low consumption problem (I still get some Westerner leftists trying to argue with me that there is no consumption problem in China, which is very strange considering all levels of government have already placed it on their top economic priority) and equally undeniable that there is a strong political will to solve this problem. It is also undeniable that the Dual Circulation strategy (balancing external circulation i.e. trade with internal circulation i.e. consumption) that the government proposed a few years ago has failed: we ended 2024 with record trade surplus and slumping consumption.

A key difference from this year’s expenditure from the standard IMF recommendation of 3% to 4% (+1.6T yuan deficit spending), which will almost certainly improve the spending deficiencies we’ve had in the last couple years, but the question is if this amount is adequate to restore consumption confidence (for the record, the US has been deficit spending 6-7% annually in the past couple years, which is the main reason that the US hasn’t gone into recession yet, even taking into account that a lot of the spending went into the top 10%, who has now made up of ~50% of consumption in the US today).

Furthermore, we still don’t know if this increase in deficit spending is a temporary measure or will they permanently enlarge the deficit and keep it above 3%. Many countries temporarily increase deficit spending during recession (Keynesian-esque policy) but will go back into austerity as soon as the situation stabilizes. And honestly, 4% is still too conservative compared to what the US has been spending, so only time will tell if this measure will actually work.

Perhaps more important is the fact that all these spending are still financed by issuing debt, especially special government bonds and special long-term government bonds. In other words, the deficit spending does not come from the creation of net new financial assets (direct money creation by the central bank), but that the central government “borrow” from financial institutions and the private sector and promise to pay back interests in the long term.

Why a government that issues its own currency needs to “borrow” from the private sector? The only logical answer is ideological indoctrination rooted in IMF-style policymaking.

This will always be a critical problem for China because it still hasn’t found a way to resolve its debt issue through cancelation. The 12T yuan “debt settlement” plan from last November revealed this mentality as much: 1) raise the debt ceiling of local governments by 6T yuan so local governments can borrow 6T yuan more from the banks at lower interest rate to pay back their outstanding high interest hidden debt; 2) issue more bonds (0.8T yuan for the next 5 years = 4T yuan) for debt servicing; and 3) the last 2T yuan of debt due by 2029 will be repaid according to the original contract.

As you can see, the measure relies heavily on “borrowing new to repay the old” mechanism and this makes the entire economy vulnerable to the Fed rate. As long as the Fed doesn’t lower its rate (which Trump can weaponize), then the local governments in China will not have access to lower interest loans to pay back their outstanding debt. It is also not clear what is the “true” size of the hidden debt since so much of that is off the books and maybe only the central government knows (or maybe even the central government could no longer keep track of that).

If you know what I have been advocating for, you will know that the central bank can always create the money needed to cancel the debt, as long as they are owed in the currency it issues (yuan). However, because China’s monetary base is heavily reliant on accumulating foreign reserves and collateralizing existing assets, the fiscal expansion will still be tied to the dollar and it will have to earn more dollars (either through exports, or attracting foreign investments) in order to create the money needed to resolve the debt.

The way out is an ideological shift away from the Chicago school neoclassical economics and actually assume full monetary sovereignty. Instead of local government borrowing billions of yuan from the commercial banks to build infrastructure/high speed rails, and bet on the rising land value to repay its debt at some point in the future (spoiler: the property prices crashed, and hence the land value as well), the central bank can simply issue the currency needed to finance the infrastructure building, cutting out all the financial institutions middle men etc:

Central bank creates reserves on commercial banks -> commercial banks create deposits on bank accounts of contractors -> contractors build infrastructure -> central bank then sells government debt to soak up the excess liquidity of commercial bank reserves (pumped into by the central bank itself) to prevent the interest rate from being driven down to 0% (and only if the central bank chooses to target a specific rate, otherwise they can just let the reserves build up without issuing any debt at all)

This bypasses the entire earning foreign currencies, collateralize existing assets, borrowing from banks, borrowing from private/foreign sector through government bonds to build infrastructures etc.

Feel free to read my long post where I explained in more detail how China’s government financing works responding to one of our posters’ question the other day, and it will become clear why China’s local governments are mired in so much debt that it can’t repay today.

Yes this. Machine translation doesn’t work very well with Russian sometimes.

Putin is a hell of a troll after all. First, he responds to Trump’s proposal for a truce with the words of a famous joke about “there is a nuance” (everyone knows it, we won’t repeat it). I wonder if Trump’s translators are that advanced.

Then he keeps Witkoff in the anteroom for eight hours, forcing him to wait out his meeting with Lukashenko, a press conference with Lukashenko, and lunch with Lukashenko. While Witkoff marinates in the waiting room, Kremlin websites publish the menu for lunch with Batka, all these veal cheeks and cucumber rolls. All this time, the Americans wait, dangling their legs.

Then Putin suddenly pulls Zelensky, hanging him in a dilemma: Russia agrees to spare the soldiers slammed in Kursk, if Zelensky gives the order to surrender (he orders to surrender = shamefully screwed up, caved in to Putin, he doesn’t order = a murderer, condemning thousands of people to death and the hardships of captivity, take your pick).

Beautiful, huh.

From the news yesterday:

“We are for it. But there is a nuance,” Putin said of a 30-day ceasefire during a press briefing. “First, what are we going to do with the encirclement in the Kursk region?”

For those who are unaware, “but there is a nuance” was a very popular Soviet joke about Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev.

Popularized by the 1934 film Chapaev by the Vasilyev brothers, which followed a fictionalized account of Chapaev’s story alongside his aide Petka, and his girlfriend Anka the Machine Gunner, these three characters had since been elevated into folk figures in the Soviet culture and spawned an entire collection of Soviet/Russian jokes, often about the absurdities of everyday life. According to the wikipedia article, Putin said in 2014 that Chapaev is his favorite film of all time.

Good question. I was thinking whether I should explain it in MMT terms but from your other replies, you seem to already have some familiarity with it so it’ll be quite easy for you to understand.

You are absolutely right in that from an MMT perspective, the Chinese government can simply create the money it wants to fund social spending etc.

However, such mechanism does not exist when it comes to RMB issuance within China’s central bank (PBOC). Since the 1994 “exchange rate reform” that unified the dual exchange rate regimes and the depreciation of the yuan from 5.8 / USD to 8.7 / USD, and especially since joining the WTO in 2001, the expansion of the yuan monetary base has come primarily from accumulation of foreign reserves (at one point, it reached 90% of all new currency issued). After 2014, as the US ended its quantitative easing, export revenues dropped sharply and China has since maintained ~$3.2T USD of foreign reserves to this day. The proportion of foreign currencies in monetary base has since dropped from 90% down to 40-50%, and the rest is replaced by the central bank issuing various forms of financial instruments that collateralize assets e.g. repo, SLF/MLF, etc. to finance the creation of new monetary base.

From 2003-2013, the yuan monetary base increased by ~21 trillion yuan (8.5x expansion), and nearly all of which came from foreign reserves. In other words, Chinese exporters earned dollars/foreign currencies, sold them to the PBOC, the latter then bought US treasuries or other form of securities and kept them as “foreign reserves”, and in turn issue an equivalent amount of yuan into the economy (e.g. depositing into the bank accounts of the exporters).

Of the 21 trillion newly issued yuan from 2003-2013, ~13 trillion (62%) went into real estate and other speculative domains. The other 8 trillion entered the real economy but because the RMB issuance mechanism was so heavily reliant on earning foreign currencies, a large part of those 8 trillion went into export-oriented sector as opposed to the domestic-oriented sector.

As such, financing of domestic-oriented economy became deprioritized. This drove local governments to borrow from commercial banks and private investors to build infrastructures and high speed rail (instead of directly financed by the central government). At the same time, because the high proportion of foreign reserves drove down the bank reserve interest rate (lower than deposit rate), this forced commercial banks to raise their lending rate and this ultimately led to a proliferation of shadow banks. Prior to 2014, local governments were not allowed to issue their own debt/bonds, and as such borrowed through these shadow banks with high interest rates, and this formed the mountain of “hidden debt” that has continued to strain the local government finances to this day.

As you can see, these are all very regressive methods of financing a government project from an MMT perspective.

Let’s say you are a local government and want to build a hospital or a high speed rail station, you have to borrow from the banks or issue bonds to attract funding from private investors. First, exporters earn foreign currencies and sell them to PBOC, which are then kept as foreign reserves (the PBOC then issues new RMB currencies into the banking reserve to increase the monetary base). Because commercial banks are required to keep a minimum reserve requirement ratio (RRR), the more reserves there are in the banking system, the more the banks can lend.

Second, because economic growth is reliant on export, the funds from bond holders would also likely come from earning foreign currencies first (or through secondary effects of export revenues being used to fund domestic development).

In either case, the financing has to first come from a foreign country willing to spend their money on Chinese goods (i.e. the US running a huge and persistent trade deficit).

On the other hand, let’s see how the RMB issuance mechanism would work under an MMT framework (China having full monetary sovereignty): PBOC directly creates new issuance of yuan into the reserve system of the commercial banks, and commercial banks then deposits bank accounts of the companies contracted to build hospitals/high speed rail stations. The excess reserve was then soaked up by the Chinese government issuing government bonds, purchased by the PBOC.

Note the very important difference here: the MMT financing mechanism involves the government directly buying from the local economy (new money injected directly into the economy), whereas the current financing mechanism that China employs often relies on selling stuff to foreigners first AND borrowing from commercial banks which increases the systemic risk of a banking crisis e.g. commercial lending creates assets for the borrowers (deposits in the local government account to build infrastructure) but also liability for the creditor (local government has to repay that debt in the future) - no new money is directly injected into the economy. If export revenue does not increase, then the broad money supply (e.g. M2 per IMF definition) expands but the monetary base stays the same.

With regards to the new Chinese government budget of increasing deficit to 4% - this is a good thing and will certainly increase spending on welfare etc. However, whether an increase from 3 -> 4% is enough to offset the slowing consumption, only time will tell. More importantly, this increase in deficit is may or may not be permanent (many countries increase their deficits during recessions and then pull back when the economy stabilizes). This is opposed to the MMT framework of calling for permanent deficit spending. In other words, the local governments would not have been mired in such a huge amount of debt (no need to borrow in the first place) had the financing mechanism was conducted this way. China would not have a problem with funding social welfare and other public services at all.

Finally, I will go through one more set of figures with you, as an example: following the 2009 GFC, the Chinese government immediately a 4 trillion yuan stimulus to keep the economy from going into recession.

Of the 4 trillion yuan, 1.18 trillion came from the central government, which was financed by issuing government bonds. The other 3.82 trillion came from local government and private sector financing. The local governments soon followed with their own initiatives that added another 18 trillion yuan into the stimulus, which was financed by borrowing from the banks or private investors.

All of the information above came from Jia Genliang’s 2018 book《国内大循环：经济发展新战略与政策选择》(The Great Domestic Circulation: New Strategy and Policy Choices for Economic Development), who is the foremost MMT/Marxist professor at the People’s University today.

As you can see, whenever the Chinese government increases its deficit spending, it has to be funded from somewhere else. This is a “hard currency” approach as opposed to the “soft currency” financing that MMT is advocating.

Hope this makes it clear. Let me know if you have any other questions.

When your brain only sees tariffs. He’s become addicted to it. Somebody needs to stop him.

China was acting in self defense, to be fair. The USSR was allying with Vietnam to surround China from both directions. Deng (actually, Mao already decided long ago) had to ally with the US to crush both of them.

In Chinese culture (for centuries in fact) there is a tradition/habit to save during times of uncertainty. People aren’t consuming because they save their money instead of spending them, in anticipation for the economic downturn e.g. being suddenly laid off over the next few months or a year. When there is no job security, people consume less.

This is very different from Western culture where there is not a customary habit to keep some savings for a rainy day and simply live from paycheck to paycheck.

Honestly it’s more of a low consumption problem, which itself is driven by the falling property prices (70% of household wealth is in real estate) and the local government debt problem, and both factors are themselves underpinned by a massive wealth inequality problem that remains unresolved.

That’s why I keep saying that developing the domestic consumption market is the only way out to reduce reliance on trade (US trade aggression) and investment (dollar hegemony).

Commentary: China wants the private sector to drive growth again, but trust can’t be rebuilt overnight

After years of cracking down on “barbaric growth of capital" in the private sector, China is wooing entrepreneurs again. Is it too little too late? Former SCMP editor-in-chief Wang Xiangwei weighs in.

HONG KONG: At the start of 2019, Chinese President Xi Jinping convened senior officials in Beijing for a workshop to discuss and prepare for “black swan” and “grey rhino” events amid a slowing economy and rising international uncertainties.

This meeting followed then US President Donald Trump’s initiation of a trade war against China in July 2018, which sent bilateral ties into a downward spiral.

Mr Xi urged officials to remain vigilant and address “major risks” across various fields, including politics, ideology, economy, society, technology and the external environment.

A black swan refers to an unpredictable market event with extreme financial consequences, while a grey rhino is a highly probable and impactful threat that is often ignored.

Since then, China’s leadership has taken decisive steps to tackle perceived grey rhinos, such as ballooning local government debts, struggling city and community banks, and the “irrational and barbaric growth of capital” in the private sector, particularly targeting big tech firms like Alibaba, which owns the South China Morning Post.

However, Beijing’s harsh campaign against the private sector has inadvertently unleashed another grey rhino: A lack of confidence among private entrepreneurs.

STIFLING INNOVATION

This lack of confidence, known in China as “lying flat” or "tang ping”, initially caught on among the country’s overworked youth who sought to do the minimum and take a break from relentless work.

During the three years of the COVID-19 pandemic, this malaise spread nationwide, affecting not only bureaucrats but also entrepreneurs.

It was also partially fed by fear that success in private business could come with political risks: In 2020, Beijing abruptly halted the US$34 billion IPO of fintech giant Ant Group, controlled by Jack Ma, after he reportedly criticised regulators for stifling innovation.

What ensued was a multi-year crackdown on the so-called “excesses” and “barbaric growth of capital” in the private sector, which has since driven entrepreneurs’ confidence to historic lows.

Mr Ma largely disappeared from the public eye following those events, reinforcing concerns that China’s business climate had become too unpredictable.

Within this context, Mr Xi’s high-profile meeting with selected private entrepreneurs, including Mr Ma, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Feb 17 is significant - his first such meeting in nearly seven years.

ARE XI’S ASSURANCES ENOUGH?

According to Xinhua, Mr Xi reportedly told entrepreneurs, also including Mr Ma, Ren Zhengfei of Huawei and Wang Chuanfu of BYD, that it was "prime time for private enterprises and entrepreneurs to give full play to their capabilities”.

He assured them that the current difficulties and challenges facing the private sector could be overcome and called for renewed confidence in the future.

Mr Xi also vowed to create equal treatment for the private sector and pledged to ensure access to bank loans while addressing widespread illicit law enforcement and administrative actions, including arbitrary fees, fines, inspections and asset seizures.

Mr Xi’s remarks represent the strongest signal of support for private enterprises at a time when China’s economy is in a deflationary cycle, weighed down by falling property prices and low consumer confidence. Meanwhile, Mr Trump in his second term has threatened additional tariffs on Chinese products, and China’s exports, one of its traditional growth engines, remain bleak.

Beijing recently announced an economic growth target of “around 5 per cent” for this year, but revitalising the private sector is crucial to achieving this goal, especially since the private sector contributes about 60 per cent to China’s gross domestic product and over 80 per cent of employment.

Will Mr Xi’s words be enough? After all, China had already been unwinding its crackdown on the private sector starting in 2023, with officials increasing pro-business rhetoric and referring to private entrepreneurs as "one of us”.

Yet in many cash-strapped localities, illicit actions against the private sector, including arbitrary fees, fines, and asset seizures, have continued unabated.

Mr Xi’s remarks are expected to curb these illicit actions, but whether they will spark optimism among private businessmen remains to be seen.

For those paying attention to the “two sessions” in China, it shouldn’t surprise you that private capital has indeed made a come back with Jack Ma’s reappearance a few weeks earlier.

I am increasingly losing faith in Xi’s ability to curb private capital. Since Li Qiang (Shanghai lib) became the Premier in early 2023, from abandoning Zero Covid policy to opening up China’s capital markets, all indications are pointing to what I have suspecting all these while, that the liberals have indeed succeeded in their coup and have been having the upper hand since 2023.

Intel appoints chip industry veteran Lip-Bu Tan as CEO

March 12 (Reuters) - Intel (INTC.O), opens new tab on Wednesday named former board member and chip industry veteran Lip-Bu Tan as its CEO and signaled the struggling but storied chipmaker was unlikely to split up its chip-design and manufacturing operations.

The appointment, effective March 18, comes three months after Intel ousted CEO and company veteran Pat Gelsinger, whose costly and ambitious plan to turn the company around was faltering and sapping investor confidence.

Tan, a former Intel board member, had been seen as a CEO contender thanks to his deep experience in the chip industry as well as a longtime technology investor in promising startups. He was approached by Intel’s board in December to gauge his interest in taking up the job, Reuters had reported.

“Together, we will work hard to restore Intel’s position as a world-class products company, establish ourselves as a world-class foundry and delight our customers like never before,” Tan said in a letter to Intel employees on Wednesday.

…

Tan, 65, is a Malaysian-born executive who grew up in Singapore and holds degrees in physics, nuclear engineering and business administration.

He served as CEO of Intel supplier and chip-design software Cadence Design Systems (CDNS.O), opens new tab from 2009 to 2021. During his term, the company’s revenue and stock surged.

Tan left Intel’s board last year over disagreements on how to turn around the company. He grew frustrated by the company’s large workforce, its approach to contract manufacturing and Intel’s risk-averse and bureaucratic culture, Reuters previously reported.

Tan will rejoin the board, Intel said.

Tan “brings stability and experience to a role that needs someone of his caliber, which is why I believe the company will likely stay the course with his appointment and continue to develop foundry and product,” said Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.

Tan’s appointment comes as Trump pushes for more manufacturing in the country, threatening tariffs on imports that have roiled global markets for weeks. While Trump has made no direct comment about Intel publicly, he has said that Asian countries including Taiwan have snatched away the United States’ edge in chipmaking.

lol, Nvidia, AMD and Intel CEOs are all ethnic Chinese now.

That’s not what I’ve said though. My position has been that we will reach a new status quo with respect to US and China’s positions by the end of this “conflict” or “period” that will then shape the next cycle of contradictions.

I wish I am wrong, to be fair. But I have obsessively kept up with Russia’s and China’s economic news, almost on a daily basis, over the past three years. The signs for optimism just isn’t there.

I just commented to another poster that we are three years later, we still don’t see anything remotely resembling of an alternative economic doctrine being proposed by the BRICS countries, and virtually nobody is talking about dedollarization now. That should be enough cause for concern.

Biden’s master stroke was from mid-2023 lol. That’s when the early warning signs started to appear, as scores of short term US treasuries began to mature after the Fed rate hike and generating unprecedented deficits from the US side.

In early 2023 I was still celebrating Xi-Putin meeting’s “historic changes not seen in a hundred years” moment.

Again, 3 years later and nobody is talking about dedollarization (and literally no alternative economic doctrine being proposed by the BRICS) should be a glaring sign for those who advocate for “multipolarity” or the “collapse of the empire”.

Too late, 2022-2023 was the watershed moment that could have transformed Russia’s economy. Unfortunately we were too optimistic about it.

The economic stimulus policy that saved Russia from recession, represented by the “economic nationalist/sovereign” faction, most prominently the Mishustin-Belousov government (and there are other even more radical ones like Glazyev, Khazin etc. but these are not in power) ultimately succumbed to the high rate from the Central Bank, represented by the “finance capital” Kudrin-Nabiullina-Siluanov faction. The import substitution initiative has more or less failed, and apart from the commercial airliner (MC-21), Russia simply replaced most of their imports from China. Such high interest rates severely limited capital investment from the businesses.

Why do you think the cabinet remained the same after Putin’s election except that Belousov got the Minister of Defense position? It’s because the finance capitalists wanted Putin to win the war in Ukraine and be done with it. The military industry was the compromise they were willing to make with Putin, while they get all the other sectors.

The writing has been on the wall for more than a year already. It’s time we get realistic and rethink how the Ukraine war has shaped the geopolitical landscape.

Russia has nothing to offer the US. China has.

Who else is going to build the supply chain and the cheap goods for the US?

If the US cannot replace its reliance on China’s industrial capacity in the next 5-10 years, then the US has no interest in destroying China. Trump cannot save the US industries - the bourgeoisie know this.

What the US financial capital wants is to enter the growing consumer market in China where they can rake in huge profit from another part of the world (the Western consumer market is already more or less saturated), not a poor and destitute China where there is nothing to gain from.

And to do this they need to create the conditions in order to force China to open up its capital markets - what Western imperialists see as the final line of defense before breaching China’s market. This has been the ultimate goal since the Mao-Nixon meeting over half a century ago, and what the US imperialists have been maneuvering against China for the past decade.

Of course, if China refuses to comply, war is always an option to forcefully reshuffle the deck.