It is a question that every developing country in the world wants to know: How can we upscale our economy? How can we make more competitive, technologically advanced product that everyone else wants?

The early 1970s gave the people of Taiwan such a challenge. Times were changing. The island needed to adapt in order to survive in a new world full of challenges. Its economy then was made up mostly of agricultural products and simple electronic assembly - exports of low value and would be easily replaced.  

In this video, I want to briefly review how the government created a world-class next-generation manufacturer, the plan they followed, and what lessons we can take away as a result. 

Recently, I watched a video by a popular YouTube channel about the economy of the Soviet Union. I have long been interested in how Soviet society worked. But sadly that particular video failed to scratch the itch. It felt a bit watered down. So I figured I would make my own. 

For generations, the Soviet Union grew faster than every other developing country except one. But once that strategy ran its course, the Soviets failed to adapt and things fell apart. It is a challenge that every country has to face at one time or another in the process of its development. 

In this video, I want to look at the rise and decline of the Soviet Economy. 

Malaysia's semiconductor industry has seen impressive growth. Following in the footsteps of its Asian neighbors, the country successfully built itself up as an attractive location for foreign direct investment. It leveraged that to make a place of its own in the semiconductor industry. 

But that industry has found itself sort of caught in the middle. Unable to invest in the future, the country’s small local cluster of semiconductor firms find themselves stuck in a tenuous place low in the value chain. With seemingly few good prospects. 

Here, we are going to look at Malaysia's place in the global semiconductor industry. 

What do Amazon Web Services and TSMC have in common? One is the cloud computing division inside the biggest e-commerce company in the world. The other is a Taiwanese state-backed semi giant. 

While these companies might seem quite different, one thing that I notice unifies them is that they provide a platform that enables other companies to succeed and exist. 

TSMC's focus on manufacturing and commitment not to compete with its customers has spawned a generation of "fabless" semiconductor companies. AWS has allowed Silicon Valley to build pure internet service companies without needing to build a data center of their own. 

For this episode, I want to look at and draw a few parallels between these two special companies. The plumbing providers of the modern internet.

At the start of the 21st century, China's solar cell industry found itself far behind those in Japan, Germany, and the United States. As late as 2003, Chinese market share of the solar cell industry was about 3%. 

In less than ten years, the Chinese solar industry absorbed foreign technical expertise, created their own indigenous capacity, and outcompeted its western incumbents. By 2013, China accounted for 60% of global solar cell production. It retains strong market share today, though a lot of production has migrated to the Southeast Asian countries due to cheaper labor costs. Europe’s share is negligible and its former national champion Q-Cells sold to a Korean company. 

ASML is a critical supplier of semiconductor lithography machinery for foundries like Intel and TSMC. In my video discussing TSMC's $28 billion capital expenditure, I briefly discussed their situation. Their CEO said in an earnings call that they can make 50 high-end EUV lithography machines a year. That's it. Without those machines, the foundries cannot churn out more 5nm chips. 

So why not make more of these machines? ASML itself has thousands of suppliers making parts that end up into its machines. Coordinating and integrating all of these parts together into a single smooth-running machine is immensely challenging.

It is December 2020 and the Bank of Japan is now the single biggest shareholder of Japanese stocks. Over the span of a decade, the central bank bought hundreds of billions of dollars in Tokyo-listed stock ETFs as part of its monetary easing programs, sitting on a handsome $130 billion profit. 

You might be forgiven for wondering if it is normal for a central bank to buy "stonks". It has never been done before in this way. Yet as Japan threatened to enter another era of economic stagnation and deflation, the bank decided to go where no bank has gone before in an effort to fight the future. 

In this video, I want to dive into a controversial, groundbreaking program and the market-distorting effects that it has wrought on the world's third largest economy.