Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

This is my annual post on the top Financial stories of the year now ending. As usual, I do not try to rank them, merely listing one Big Story for each of the twelve months of the year. Each story is accompanied by a ( bold ) acknowledgement of the theme it may illustrate. But my emphasis is on the story, not the theme.  Something happened with a particular who-what-when-where structure in each of these twelve instances.  Despite all the storm-and-stress over the election campaign in the US, and the obvious financial significance of the result both within the US and without, you will not find much of that campaign in this post. It isn't even featured in the  November  entry. Yet four of our grafs are US-focused. They focus not on the racehorse of the campaign, but on the stakes. If there is a theme here, though, it is the significance of financial/economic sanctions in wartime. Most of the "western world" has sanctioned Russia for its assault upon the sovereignty of U...

Back in July, after President Biden's disastrous old-mannish debate performance, stocks in Taiwan took a tumble. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., a chipmaker critical to the world's computer industry, collapsed, losing 5.6% of its value on a single day. This was largely on fear that the debate foretold a coming Trump Presidency, and that Trump would be less interested than Biden or several earlier Presidents in preserving Taiwan's de facto independence from Beijing.    It might be natural to ask: if TSMC stock fell sharply on the danger that Trump would be elected, what has the reality of a Trump election done to it?   Kind of strange but ... the immediate effect has been to lift the price. Here is a six-month chart: TSMC stock chart - Google Search The TSMC stock price, as you can see, was rising more-or-less steadily for the first two months of the charted period, peaking on July 10. That is a little to the left of the central axis of the above screen shot...

  As you may see from the news stories to which I linked you yesterday: the former President is open about the fact that he would not use US forces to protect Taiwan from an invasion from the Chinese mainland. He has allowed for the possibility that Taiwan could pay the US enough to change his mind: but I doubt that deal would ever get done.  The business of lending out an army for mercenary use didn't end well for  Yevgeny Prigozhin. [In case you have forgotten the name, you'll probably remember the face, here.]  One fascinating fact about this situation: Taiwan is the center of the world's semiconductor industry. Somewhere at the back of the Orange Guy's alleged mind is the thought, "If the PRC takes them over, the fighting will likely destroy their semiconductor industry, allowing the US to re-assert its dominance in that matter."  That is insane, but no more so that his babbling about sharks.  Anyway, there are lots of industries in the United States th...

  The US election is much watched in Taiwan, aka the Republic of China.  I'll just offer three quick links on the subject today, hoping to have something to say tomorrow. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-invites-china-to-invade-taiwan-if-he-returns-to-office.html  https://www.reuters.com/world/china/taiwan-must-protect-its-sovereignty-know-its-own-history-president-says-2024-07-21/ https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/sirens-sound-streets-deserted-taiwan-simulates-chinese-missile-strike-2024-07-23/

  Two points today. First, a lot of the wealth of Greater China is about to experience a generational turnover. Greater China is defined for this purpose as the People's Republic, including the special administrative district of Hong Kong, AND the Republic of China, aka Taiwan. Trillions are about to change hands as a critical cohort of old guys dies off and leaves their world to their heir.  Second, IMHO, the People's Republic is not about to attack Taiwan. There is a fair amount of saber rattling right now, but the PRC sees its way to becoming a great regional hegemon and that way may be a lot clearer if it is seen as a force for order in the region.  The relevant region is just about everything south of the old Soviet Union and north of the equator, stretching from Ethiopia to Indonesia.  The People's Republic wants peace with the other China so Greater China as a single entity can become the hegemon in that vast region. A third point, subsuming each of the first...

 People who wonder about the contents of the defunct website Vote.net may never be able to see any of it. Except for the three items I highlighted last week.  Why those three? There was a stochastic element to the rescue operation, I grant you. But the three I selected might well go into a time capsule entitled "things politically conscious people were talking about in the spring of 2022." Let us go over why.  My "Science" item was not about science, in any purist sense. Nor was it about technology news, because the tech developments that provide some grounding for it are old "news" indeed. It was about the global competitive structure for one particular well-established technology. Greater China  (a phrase one uses to combine Taiwan with the PRC) dominates the world of semiconductor manufacture. Taiwan alone, a smallish island, manufactured 22.4% of chips created anywhere in 2020. The People's Republic, that huge dragon with a curved belly near Taiwan...

I wrote for a little more than a year, (ending in April 2022) on a steady basis, for a small operation that hoped to explain public affairs to young people -- pre-teens and early teens. This operation created a small income stream for me ($400 a month) which nonetheless sometimes came in very useful when it arrived. I lost this stream of income when the project closed down operations. Their site went down in the aftermath of the cessation of operations, but someone brought it back. With one cryptic exception there is nothing on it posted subsequent to early May of this year, when they ran out of the inventory of my work.  Sooner or later -- likely sooner -- the site will be taken down. I have a fondness for some of the work I did for it, so I will risk whatever the IP consequences might be and post some of my work here.  They fall into three categories. I wrote about health (Covid, cancer research, the health insurance industry, etc.), politics (in a narrow sense involving cam...