Saturday, May 31, 2025

Chips: "TSMC to Open EU Design Center in Munich in Q3"

From EE Times, May 27:

At its 2025 Europe Technology Symposium in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, TSMC announced that it is establishing a European design center in Munich, scheduled to open in Q3 2025 in order to support its European customers.

The company said that this will be its tenth design center, joining a network of design centers across Taiwan, the U.S., Canada, mainland China and Japan. TSMC said it chose Munich rather than Dresden—the latter is where it is building a fab for the N16 and N28 families—because Munich is close to its European customers.

According to the media briefing held today, the European Design Center will facilitate optimized chip designs for emerging applications in automotive, industrial applications, AI, telecommunications, IoT and beyond, as well as cultivate and expand expertise in automotive and non-volatile memory across the EU, focusing on advancing rapidly growing RRAM and MRAM innovations while supporting the industry to move beyond eFlash technology.

Technology roadmap plus N2/N3 tape-outs

From a technology roadmap viewpoint, the European event reiterated the developments in process technologies and packaging that it presented at the North American counterpart event in California last month (see TSMC Announces World-Leading A14 Node to Power AI), providing updates on A14, A16, N2, N3, as well as its 3D silicon stacking and advanced packaging. It also noted factors like integrated power delivery to improve power delivery density....

....MUCH MORE 

India And Beyond: "The math tutor and the missing $533 million"

Following-up on September 2023's "The World's Highest Valuation EdTech Transferred A Half-Billion Dollars To A Hedge Fund Based Out Of A Florida IHOP" (sometimes the follow-ups take a while to show up)

From Rest of World, May 27:

From Dubai, the enigmatic founder of Byju’s recounts how he made his empire — and vows to rebuild it. 

One morning in January, Byju Raveendran sat in the back seat of his shiny black Cadillac as it sped through Dubai. Just three years prior, the schoolteachers’ son had appeared on the Forbes list of richest Indians as founder and CEO of Byju’s, then one of the world’s most valuable education technology companies. He was dressed casually in a T-shirt and jeans, while his driver, Hashim, was more formally attired in a collared shirt. Raveendran, square-jawed and muscular at 45, told me he typically rides beside Hashim in the passenger seat, seeming intent on underscoring his down-to-earthness. “I always sit there, no, Hashim?” he asked, with a boyish laugh. Hashim nodded. 

Former Byju’s employees had told me about Raveendran’s love for staying at the world’s finest hotels, and the upscale properties and luxury cars his family owned when he was based in Bengaluru. I’d heard his wife and co-founder, Divya Gokulnath, described as a jet-setter who networked with Silicon Valley elites.

But beyond the Cadillac, Raveendran didn’t seem keen for me to get a glimpse of his wealth. He was facing accusations of defrauding U.S. lenders for hundreds of millions of dollars, while tens of thousands of his employees had been laid off. I’d hoped to be invited to his home — one source told me it was a mansion in a gated community of Dubai. Instead, he showed up at my hotel on short notice to take me to a South Indian restaurant for a simple breakfast of idli, vada, and sambar — his staple meal during a modest upbringing in a village in Kerala.

Raveendran wanted to show he hadn’t let success get to his head, and wouldn’t let his company’s staggering problems, either. He was defiant that his entrepreneurial journey wasn’t over yet. “Why I am confident of a comeback is that the most valuable thing I had is still with me,” he said, referring to himself.

Byju’s, launched in 2011, developed into a learning app that quickly became one of the best known brands across India. It made Raveendran a pioneer in the rapidly expanding sector of educational technology, in a country with a massive appetite for education solutions. By 2017, marquee investors like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative had vaulted Byju’s into the upper echelons of global edtech companies, sparking a worldwide acquisitions spree. In 2022, the company was valued at about $22 billion, with roughly 60,000 employees and millions of paying users.

But things unraveled — slowly at first, and then all of a sudden. In September 2023, the Board of Control for Cricket in India took Byju’s to court for defaulting on a $19 million sponsorship payment. BCCI’s complaint came just months after news that Byju’s had allegedly defaulted on a $1.2 billion loan from U.S. lenders. They sued Byju’s parent company, Think and Learn, in a bankruptcy court in Delaware. The details included in that suit were shocking: The plaintiffs alleged that $533 million of the loan had been siphoned to a sham hedge fund once registered at the address of an International House of Pancakes restaurant in Miami. The fund was run by a 23-year-old with seemingly no relevant educational or professional experience, who’d purportedly spent part of the funds on a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, and a Rolls-Royce....

....MUCH MORE 

The so-called hedgie is interesting in his own right. From deep in the link-vault, the Wall Street Journal's Bankruptcy newsletter, March 13, 2024:

Hedge-Fund Founder Backed by Byju’s Says He Fled U.S. Out of Fear 
A bankruptcy court judge has threatened to jail William Cameron Morton over nearly $540 million the Indian ed-tech company invested in his hedge fund

A hedge-fund founder at the center of a $1.2 billion legal battle between Indian education-technology company Byju’s and its lenders is staying outside the U.S. despite a court order to return, saying he fears for his safety.

William Cameron Morton said in an interview that he left the U.S. rather than comply with a court order to divulge the whereabouts of nearly $540 million that Byju’s invested in his Florida-based hedge-fund firm, Camshaft Capital.

Morton faces the threat of jail time because he hasn’t turned over that information to investors that lent $1.2 billion to Byju’s, once India’s most valuable startup before its financial problems clouded the country’s venture-capital scene. Judge John Dorsey of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del., recently threatened Morton with “all possible sanctions,” including confinement, if he continued ignoring orders.

Credit funds including Ares Management and Redwood Capital allege that Morton helped Byju’s move more than a half-billion dollars out of their reach through his hedge fund, which they have called a sham operation. Last month, an agent acting on the lenders’ behalf filed a chapter 11 petition for Byju’s Alpha, a shell entity named as the loan borrower, as part of their efforts to track down the money it invested in Camshaft. Byju’s has said it wasn’t required under its loan agreement to keep its assets in cash and did nothing wrong by investing $540 million with Camshaft.

A foreign trust connected to Byju’s cashed out the company’s interest in a Camshaft hedge fund last month, court records show. Morton has defied a court order to disclose the name and location of that foreign trust.

“I declined because it’s all I have to protect my life, and I can’t give that away,” he said in the interview. Morton wouldn’t say where he is now located.

He also denied the lenders’ allegation that Camshaft is a sham, while saying that recent redemptions by Byju’s and other investors have left the firm, which he founded in 2020, with a fraction of the assets under management it once had. The money invested by Byju’s made up the bulk of the $596 million that Camshaft was managing as of last year.

Morton said that while hiking in the woods near Montreal in January, he realized he was being followed by another person, an “athletic man dressed in all black with a ski mask and a backpack.” Morton said he didn’t know who the man was or why he was there. A business associate of Morton’s said Morton had relayed the same account to him in January.

“I am out of the country now out of fear. I don’t want to be doing this,” Morton said. “I have an impending bench warrant for incarceration, and I treat that seriously. This is 180 degrees outside of my character and principles.”

The company has accused the lenders of exploiting a technical default under its credit agreement to extort the company for a windfall, which they deny. It has also characterized its purchase of a limited-partnership interest in Camshaft in 2021 as a “commercially prudent investment” in fixed-income assets. The company has said in court filings that it moved its interest in Camshaft out of the U.S. last year before redeeming that investment last month—just as Byju’s Alpha filed for chapter 11.

Morton’s lawyers said at a hearing earlier this month that he had left the U.S. and retained criminal-defense counsel. In response, Judge Dorsey ordered him to appear in person at a bankruptcy-court hearing scheduled for Thursday and show why he shouldn’t be held in contempt of court.  

Timothy Pohl, a restructuring professional appointed by the lenders to run Byju’s Alpha, has said in bankruptcy filings that it had “no legitimate reason” to choose an unknown and unproven hedge fund to manage so much capital. He has sought court orders returning the funds, plus interest, from Byju’s and its affiliates.

The lenders also dispatched private investigators in recent months to visit locations associated with Camshaft and to track down friends and associates of Morton, court papers show. The lenders’ probe found that Camshaft misrepresented the makeup of its management team on its website and had charged above-market fees to investors, including a 3% management fee and 30% performance fee, more than most top-tier funds, Pohl said in a recent filing. His filing said there is “no reason to believe” that Byju’s chose Camshaft for its investment acumen or track record or to maximize a return on investment.

“If those were the goals, there were far superior options,” Pohl’s filing said. “Rather, it appears Camshaft was selected in furtherance of a deliberate scheme to hinder, delay, and defraud creditors.”....

"Cardinal Richelieu explains Vladimir Putin"

We have dropped in on Spengler (David Goldman) and Cardinal Richelieu  a couple times, links below.

Our boilerplate introduction to the writer: 

...The author of this piece, David Goldman, is Deputy Editor (Business) at Asia Times.
Prior to taking that position he was:

  • Global head of credit strategy at Credit Suisse
  • Global Head of Fixed Income Research for Bank of America
  • Global Head of Fixed Income Research at Cantor Fitzgerald

In addition to apparently not being able to hold onto a job I think one of his requirements for moving on was a "Global Head" title. (JK, young Master. G.)

From David Goldman (Spengler), Deputy Editor (Business) at Asia Times, April 2, 2022 i.e. 37 days after Russia invaded Ukraine - alternatively 1192 days ago.

The cardinal’s ghost cites his own ‘grey eminence’ to show that time is the deadliest of weapons

“Ladybird, ladybird fly away home,

Your house is on fire and your children are gone.”

The ghost of Cardinal Richelieu was singing the old children’s rhyme to the tune of “Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” in his Maurice Chevalier accent. The scratchy sound of an old 78-rpm record buzzed through my earbuds as Richelieu’s avatar danced a few steps of soft-shoe to accompany the song.

We stood, or rather hovered, in a Metaverse reconstruction of the Cardinal’s palace on the Place de Vosges. It was creepier than the ossuary of the Carthusians many levels below the sewers of Paris where I had first conjured Richelieu’s ghost.

Still in beta testing, the Metaverse already was infested with ghosts. The Oculus headset that I obtained from a software engineer who wore the habit of the Capuchin monks projected Richelieu’s specter in cheerful 3-D.

“You are aware, Spengler, that the ditty comes from the Thirty Years’ War in Germany,” said the Cardinal’s ghost: “’Maikäfer flieg! Der Vater ist im Krieg. Die Mutter ist in Pommerland, und Pommerland ist abgebrannt.’ Or in your barbarous language: ‘Ladybird, fly! Father’s gone to war. Mother is in Pomerania, and Pomerania is burned to the ground.’

“Eminence,” I stammered, “I know the rhyme, but what does that have to do with Ukraine?”

“That, Spengler, should be obvious to a scribbler who writes so confidently of the extinction of civilizations. Dilettantes like the Americans think of eliminating a regime. Real connoisseurs of power arrange to eliminate entire provinces. I understand Putin; in a way I envy him. When Charles De Gaulle flew to Moscow to meet Stalin in 1944, he wondered what he might have achieved had he commanded a country like Russia rather than the mere nation of France.”

Richelieu gloated: “With half the population ruled by the Austro-Spanish Habsburgs, allied to Catholic Germany, France ruined its enemies during the Thirty Years’ War. Imagine what I could have done with Russia! The Swedes whom I bribed ravaged Pomerania and left it without people. Children still sing of it. Yet three generations later Peter the Great broke the pride of Sweden, in 1709, at Poltava in Ukraine.”

“But Eminence,” I protested, “Russia has done poorly in its war on Ukraine. It is bogged down with high casualties and missed its chance for a quick victory, and it has succeeded only in uniting the whole of the West against it.”

“I expected better from you, Spengler, than to repeat the nonsense one reads in the newspapers,” Richelieu spat back. A glowing blob of ectoplasm stuck to my Oculus visor. “A quick victory, indeed? And what makes you think that Putin ever wanted a quick victory?”

That stumped me. “Pardon my effrontery, Eminence, but if Putin didn’t want a quick victory, what did he want?”

“Time,” said Richelieu, “is the ultimate weapon. I understood this, and Putin has learned his lesson well. Clausewitz was in general correct when he said that war was the continuation of policy by other means, but there are occasions when war itself is the policy. Here is what Aldous Huxley wrote in his book The Grey Eminence, a profile of my chief of intelligence, Father Joseph de Tremblay. Huxley is quite accurate, as well he should be, for he heard the story first-hand from me, in the ossuary of the Carthusians below the sewers of Paris:

In a memorandum on the affairs of Germany, which he wrote in January 1631 for the instruction of the King, Father Joseph insisted that French policy should be directed to the systematic exploitation of time as the deadliest of all weapons in the Bourbons’ armory. To this end, the negotiations which [Father Joseph on behalf of the Cardinal] had begun at Ratisbon were to be continued, unremittingly. 

While the imperial Diet was in session, there had poured into Ratisbon, from every corner of Germany, an unending stream of supplicants… Among these supplicants was a group of delegates from Pomerania. Humbly, but nonetheless insistently, they begged the Emperor and the Electors to consider the lamentable state of their province… Very many had died, and those who survived were eating grass and roots — yes, and young children and the sick and even the newly buried dead….

And yet here [Father Joseph] was, pursuing, patiently and with consummate skill, a policy which could only increase the sufferings of the poor he had promised to serve. With full knowledge of what had already happened in Pomerania, he continued to advocate a course of action that must positively guarantee the spread of cannibalism to other provinces.

“Your house is on fire, your children are gone!” chirped the ghost of Richelieu triumphantly. “Two-thirds of the people of Pomerania perished. When the war ended the founder of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm I, found himself without a people, so he invited the persecuted Huguenot of France under the Edict of Potsdam, as well as Poles, the Jews of Lithuania, and whomever else he could entice. His great-grandson Frederick the Great built 1,000 villages by draining swamplands and peopled them with 300,000 immigrants. Pomerania had its revenge on France, to be sure, but it took a century to round up enough Pomeranians to make a difference.”

“France suffered during the Thirty Years’ War as well,” Richelieu burbled, “but there is a reason that the cannibal witch of Hansel and Gretel was a German and not a Frenchwoman.”

I stood in the CGI recreation of the palace on the Place des Vosges in stupefied silence. At length, I whispered, “What will happen to Ukraine?”

“Putin will leave Ukraine as he left Chechnya – although Boris Yeltsin deserves a good deal of the credit; he directed the First Chechen War in 1994, when half a million of Chechnya’s 1.3 million people were displaced, perhaps 100,000 civilians were killed, and half the country was ruined. Perhaps another 100,000 civilians died – so many fled it is hard to tell. Russian troops leveled the capital Grozny in 1999, at high cost to themselves. I find it amusing that American commentators hold up Yeltsin as an exemplar of democratic benevolence when he was every bit as brutal as Putin. There is only one way to govern Russia, and it does not involve lace doilies.”....

....MUCH MORE

 Previously:

Goldman was also one of the few people who understood the inflation dynamic of the first part of this decade: 2021 -2023. Here's a look back from September, 2022 with some of those links:

Credit Where Credit Is Due: One of the People Who Understood That Inflation Is More Than Just Gasoline Prices

Here's a graphical presentation of headline CPI inflation from Trading Economics (also on blogroll at right):



June 2022's 9.1% headline CPI was the reported top-tick:

Today's 9.1% CPI Print: Analysts React

 and as we can see, inflation was indeed transitory.

Of course the Weimar hyper-inflation was also transitory, as are all things that humans do. 

Additionally, the hyper part of the German inflation wrapped up much quicker than the American experience during the early years of the current decade.

For our part, we were saying during the inflation run-up: "Sic Transit Gloria Mundi,"
Everything is transitory. Thus passes the glory of the world,

For a couple years. Literally.

In more carefree days-gone-by, we also posted Sic Transit Gloria Monday and Sic Transit Gloria Money.

And just so you know, we were no inflationistas-come-lately, we got lucky in December 2020 because we watch commodities, including food, prices.

December 29, 2020
St. Louis Fed: Food Prices As An Indicator Of Future Inflation
An interesting commentary, especially in light of the generations of Econ profs admonishing against putting much weight on headline inflation, as food and energy prices are volatile and should be stripped out to reveal core CPI and PPI trends.

From the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, January 1, 2002:.... 

We followed up on May 27, 2021:

"St. Louis Fed: Food Prices As An Indicator Of Future Inflation"

We first posted this paper on December 29, 2020 as a test of the thesis. At the time the UN's FAO Food Price Index had printed higher for six consecutive months. The correlation with coming CPI prices apparently held as we saw headline prints of 1.4% in the February report (January data), 1.7% YoY in March, 2.6% YoY in the April 13 report, and 4.2% earlier this month.

The FAO Food Price Index has now risen for eleven consecutive months. The month of May has been bearish for row crops so we will get to see if the correlations hold and/or see what lag/lead times might be. Remember, this is a test. Your mileage may vary. Close cover before striking...

The reference was repeated on September 6, 2021; and March 7 2022, interspersed with a hundred other inflation posts including September 14, 2021's:

CPI Rate of Increase Dips, Cheese Futures Unchanged

As scribblers around the world try to fit this morning's report into their preferred storylines, we're going to go with a kicky fromage fort because for some asinine reason I was looking at CME cheese futures when the Bureau of Labor Statistics made the release:

"CPI for all items rises 0.3% in August; gasoline, food, shelter among indexes rising"  

And all I could think of was cheese dip. 

You'll need 225g of assorted hard and soft bits of cheese, a clove of garlic, a bottle of white wine (60 ml for the recipe and the rest for you and yours)......

Wait, where was I? BLS?....

Friday, May 30, 2025

Spying On The US of A

The fact that the counterintelligence people—one that comes to mind was a guy named Peter Strzok who was  Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division—that they weren't cashiered and criminally investigated for their failures during the twenty-teens seems rather amazing.

From American Affairs Journal, volume IX, number 2/Summer 2025:

Data-Broke: U.S. Tech Firms’ Counterintelligence Dilemma

Nearly a decade has passed since the breach of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) by Chinese state-backed hackers in the spring of 2015. That the operation netted Beijing the detailed backgrounds and personal data of over twenty million federal employees, clearance-holders, and applicants, as well as that of their co-habitants and spouses, constituted one of the most damaging counterintelligence breaches in U.S. history. Assessing the loss, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Agency (NSA) chief Michael Hayden offered a blunt, sobering take: “It remains a treasure trove of information that is available to the Chinese [Communist Party] until the people represented by that information age off. There’s no fixing it.” In his estimation, the impact of the breach would take a generation or more to fully subside, until the youngest members of the federal workforce at that time ultimately retired.1

Over the following decade, it would become clear that such counterintelligence hazards would hardly subside at all for reasons that were not yet fully evident, but still perhaps predictable. The aggregation of personal and location data on American consumers, including military service members, intelligence officers, national security officials, and contractors, would become part and parcel of the data-driven advertising behemoth that underpins the modern digital economy. While the threat of sophisticated cyber breaches into sensitive datasets remains, another trend is both an addition and contributor to the hacking risk: there is little need to steal through cunning espionage what can be obtained through little cost or effort in a vast and open data marketplace.

The question is whether such a status quo can be sustained without causing irrevocable damage to the counterintelligence interests of the United States. Can consumer data be treated as a “strategic resource,” as the most recent National Counterintelligence Strategy asserts, from both the commercial and security perspectives simultaneously?2 Or will one necessarily come at the expense of the other? As the age of “Big Data” and advances in computing have birthed the Artificial Intelligence era, these questions require urgent attention from policymakers. In what follows, we argue that they have, indeed, at critical points come into underappreciated but serious tension.

From OPM to Equifax to Salt Typhoon, the issue is now less that a single sensitive puzzle piece might be collected by U.S. adversaries but that a holistic mosaic has already been aggregated: that a vivid and detailed picture of U.S. military, intelligence, and national security rank-and-file personnel is coming into view for any sophisticated adversaries who care to look.

Military Jogging Routes and AdTech Targeting Packages

It’s no secret that the entities that collect and store people’s data are vulnerable to hacking. What is far less understood is the degree to which companies building and managing smartphones, laptops, mobile apps, websites, and myriad other digital technologies and interfaces all collect, aggregate, analyze, and share people’s information. Jogging enthusiasts and open-source intelligence researchers brought this problem to the fore in 2018 when they revealed that Strava, a software application linked to FitBit devices, had been publicly posting the geolocations of its users. This oversight enabled curious online sleuths to watch U.S. military forces and intelligence officers in countries around the world as they jogged around forward operating bases and visited, presumably, safe houses.3 While hardly a responsible privacy practice (even average runners might find their total run history, with timestamps, made avail­able online without a password disturbing), what would have been an obvious, serious breach in a government context was the product instead of shockingly widespread industry data practices.

Corporations that are even less understood accelerate this personal data collection, aggregation, and analysis further. Companies that manage real-time bidding networks—algorithmically run online auc­tions for other companies to buy “ad space” on an app, website, and so forth in order to show people ads—make reams of personal data available to countless entities sitting in the virtual auction house, on a constant basis, every single day.

Data brokers, those companies in the business of aggregating and selling people’s data, likewise root their business, and as such their profit margins, on repeatedly selling information they’ve bought, compiled, and inferred to a wide range of buyers, largely at their own discretion.

Connected devices used by American consumers now routinely come with third-party software installed which transmits information about users, activity, and location to the digital advertising market—data brokers and bidding exchanges—to be packaged, traded, and sold. And companies that want to target people with particular messages, and then collect data on their responses, can leverage adtech companies to profile and reach individuals.

The prodigious volumes of data both collected and publicly available on data markets illustrate the remarkable extent to which Americans’ personal information is rendered vulnerable to being hacked, stolen, and compromised. This fact alone should put OPM-style hacks into per­spective. As NSA General Counsel April Doss wrote in 2020, governments pose but one facet of the challenge: “Data collected by national security programs [have come to] pale in comparison to the exquisitely detailed user profiles that are being amassed” either by, for, or on behalf of the U.S. tech sector.4

From Dating Apps to General Motors

A host of real-world events and civil society investigations from the post‑OPM decade illustrate why the explosion of commercially avail­able Big Data complicates and accelerates the counterintelligence dilem­ma facing the United States. Researchers have long demonstrated the ease of identifying, targeting, and even inducing U.S. and allied military service-members through their use of social media, dating, and messaging apps.5 Their findings highlight the already high risks posed by poor organizational and operational security in the digital era.

More recently, a group of journalists outlined how even the most conscientious users, including those playing sensitive roles in government, intelligence, or the military, would be hard-pressed to extricate themselves from the digital ecosystem hard-wired into their devices. The team accessed geolocation and related data from in and around a U.S. military installation in Germany, one which is said to house, among other things, elements of America’s nuclear arsenal and intelligence collection platforms. Their assessment is alarming: “Not only is [such] data collection likely capable of revealing military secrets, it is essentially unavoidable at the personal level. . . service members’ lives being simply too intertwined with the technology permitting it.”6

Attempts to cordon off specific locales from such data-harvesting are unlikely to alleviate such counterintelligence concerns. The vast majority of modern smart devices require some degree of geolocation data to function properly. Even if tech companies were prohibited from collecting and selling geolocation around specific sensitive facilities, the prohibition would fail to cover everywhere else affiliated personnel travel, everyone else they associate with, and everything else they do.7 U.S. law generally requires an affirmative opt-in from users to collect and sell geolocation data, but this appears to serve more as a speed bump (or speeding ticket) rather than an adequate barrier against the targeting of U.S. officials and installations.8 Just as the average citizen flies past the privacy policy and terms of service briefly popped onto their screens, clicking “agree” without so much as a substantive glance, so, too, do many U.S. government affiliates, rendering their supposed opt-ins just as illegitimate in practice. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has only historically taken a small number of enforcement actions against violators, most recently against General Motors.9 Such actions, however, are mostly designed to bring offending organizations into full (or stricter) compliance with the law, while any punitive fines for unscrupulous activity ($51,744 per violation) are likely insufficient to serve as a deterrent in the broader multi-billion dollar digital advertising industry.10

The inability or unwillingness of the industry to police itself essentially means the data brokerage ecosystem can only be as ethically or legally respectful of consumer privacy as its least scrupulous participants. As legal scholar Andy Wang argues, “The magnitude of harm arising from one broker’s activities depends on what data other brokers in the network are selling.”11

Unlike tangible goods, data is an endlessly duplicable, non-exhaustible, and non-rivalrous good. A “tragedy of the commons” thus prevails: if one broker accumulates and sells nonconsensual or otherwise protected data, the compliance efforts of others can be mooted. Compounding the issue is that so-called know your customer (KYC) practices are either nonexistent or inconsistently applied throughout the data brokerage industry. According to a team of scholars from Duke University, “A malicious actor could easily lie their way around many data brokers’ lax KYC controls, or simply find a broker with virtually no KYC practices whatsoever.”12

Meanwhile, the promise that the data collected and aggregated on U.S. citizens can be safely and irreversibly “anonymized” has been repeatedly debunked as wishful thinking by researchers. For instance, a 2019 study at Imperial College, London, drew on just fifteen demographic attributes to reidentify U.S. citizens from an anonymized dataset, concluding that a composite picture of 99.98 percent of Americans could likewise be constituted, “seriously challeng[ing] the technical and legal adequacy of the de-identification release-and-forget model.”13 Nordic academics in 2021 likewise found that a year’s worth of usage data by 3.5 million people from as few as four mobile apps was sufficient to reidentify 91.2 percent of them by cross-referencing publicly available information.14 “Americans are the easiest to re-identify,” the authors noted, raising the stakes in a society where only a small handful of companies control the entire mobile app ecosystem.

Endless hype cycles about AI and the future of the digital economy only further accelerate companies’ efforts to collect vast amounts of information, aggregate and analyze disparate datasets, and monetize and sell data previously collected for a limited purpose. In other words, they accelerate the collection and dissemination of what is, at the end of the day, effectively exploitable intelligence on U.S. assets and personnel.

Protectionism, AI Competition,
and Strategic Vulnerability

In 2025, national-level economic planning and industrial policy have largely shed the stigma that once surrounded them. As competition with China continues to intensify and a second Trump administration takes its stride, all eyes are on a U.S. tech sector that has achieved an almost mythical strategic significance. Beyond their innovative capacities, the U.S. federal bureaucracy and military-industrial complex have become widely dependent upon—if not inextricably linked with—the major tech multinationals, such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Palantir, Starlink, OpenAI, and others. The continued success of these firms is thus considered as much an issue of national security (however spurious those claims may be) as one of geoeconomic vitality....

....MUCH MORE

If interested here is a series of articles from Foreign Policy to which we linked in January 2021:

The Unbelievable Failure Of The CIA And The Intelligence Community Regarding China

This is part II of a three part essay from Foreign Policy. We linked to part I in January 2's: Data and Money and Death: "China Used Stolen Data to Expose CIA Operatives in Africa and Europe".

China Beats the CIA Pt. III: "Tech Giants Are Giving China A Vital Edge in Espionage"

"The Prince, His Money Manager and the Corruption Scandal Rocking Monaco"

From the Wall Street Journal Magazine, May 24:

He safeguarded the family’s fortune—and their secrets. Now, it’s all unraveling. 

TUCKED ONE STREET behind Monte Carlo’s historic harbor, which is famously dotted with champagne bars and anchored by the storied casino that was the backdrop to multiple James Bond films, the Monaco police station may be the most unglamorous building in one of the world’s most glamorous settings.

Gray and boxy, it looks more like student housing on a university campus than a bulwark of security for the global elite who flock here as much for its aura of protective secrecy as its shimmering scenery.

But over two days this February, in the police captain’s office with a window facing up the rocky slope toward the palace, a dapper 68-year-old suspect in a corruption scandal rattled one of Europe’s most storied royal families and shook the foundations of a tiny country built on polished appearances, ironclad confidentiality and tightly choreographed power.

The suspect, Claude Palmero, has salt-and-pepper hair and wears wire-rim glasses. If he looks like an accountant, it’s because he is, and he now finds himself at the center of the alleged corruption scandal.

For much of his adult life, Palmero was the financial gatekeeper for Prince Albert II, Monaco’s ruler for the past two decades and the son of Prince Rainier III and Princess Grace, the Oscar-winning actress formerly known as Grace Kelly.

A devoted sportsman, environmentalist and philanthropist, 67-year-old Albert has a fortune that has been conservatively estimated at more than 1 billion euros, and by all accounts he historically paid little attention to how it was managed. Instead, he entrusted it to Palmero as his administrateur des biens. That role, which Palmero inherited from his father, empowered him to manage Albert’s private fortune, including by orchestrating quiet cash transfers when requested by the prince or others in the royal family.

Palmero oversaw not only Prince Albert’s private fortune but also assets held by the Crown, from prime real estate to a vast array of collections—including cars, stamps, coins and artworks, as well as financial holdings.

But the relationship turned sour in 2023, after a leak of hacked documents implicated Palmero in a number of alleged corruption and influence-peddling schemes. In a casual text message that belied the chaos that was to come, Albert in May of 2023 wrote to his longtime money manager: “I am now more or less obliged to speak out…to ‘blow the whistle’ a little bit to signal the end of recess and try to reassure many people here at home.” He fired Palmero weeks later. 

Albert also initiated a broader shake-up at the top of the principality. Dozens of insiders left their posts, including some of Monaco’s most influential power brokers. 

The move kicked off a wave of recriminations and more damaging leaks, including from notebooks Palmero meticulously kept about the prince’s private activities.

French newspapers ran some contents of the notebooks, highlighting Albert’s financial support for his children born out of wedlock and their mothers, as well as the spending of his wife—Princess Charlene, a former Olympic swimmer—and other members of the royal family. (Monaco is a principality, not a kingdom, though the public widely refers to its ruling dynasty as a royal family.)

In September 2023, Albert ratcheted up the feud further by filing a lawsuit—along with his sisters—against Palmero, accusing him of breach of trust and theft. The charges were later expanded to include forgery, use of forged documents and money laundering. According to people close to the prince, it was the first time in over 700 years of the Grimaldi dynasty that a ruler filed a criminal complaint against a Monaco resident.

The February interrogations at the police station, spanning two full days, were part of the continuing investigation that is discreetly winding its way through Monaco’s courts. 

Palmero has been questioned about Panamanian holding companies, Swiss bank accounts and secret payments made to keep the prince’s private life exactly that—private. During questioning, he was not even allowed to use the bathroom without a guard escort.

Palmero has denied the allegations. Prosecutors have interviewed him on multiple occasions but have not brought any charges. Palmero’s defense can be boiled down to this: All of his activity was designed with the best interests of the prince in mind, including cleaning up the messes made by Albert and other members of the royal family, who paid little attention to their finances and spending. 

In February, for example, Palmero was asked about a roughly $15.9 million transfer he made to a company called Étoile de Mer. 

Palmero referred the officer to a letter addressed to the prince’s legal team, explaining that the funds had ultimately ended up with a company used to cover expenses tied to Nicole Coste, the former Air France flight attendant and onetime lover of Prince Albert, as well as their son, Alexandre. 

The prince “wished for the utmost confidentiality so that this situation would not become known to his wife,” the letter read, according to documents viewed by WSJ. Magazine.

Police investigators also questioned Palmero about a $795,000 transfer flagged by auditors as “suspect.” He described it as reimbursement for years of unlogged spending on behalf of the prince himself, kept private “for reasons of confidentiality” and his own sense of duty and discretion. 

Among the outlays Palmero claimed to have quietly absorbed: rent for the prince’s Monaco bachelor pad, the salaries and housing arrangements for Coste’s staff and assorted costs tied to Princess Charlene’s private Monaco apartment, which he said were deliberately kept off the books to avoid leaving evidence that she sometimes stayed outside the palace.

The commingling of funds was further complicated by Palmero’s practice of investing alongside the royal family, which he said he could do because he has a personal fortune of more than $113.5 million, much of which came from an inheritance. 

In one instance, police pressed Palmero on why some $185 million—mostly in private-equity funds—was held in a company called Janus, which was owned by Palmero. 

“Janus is a two-headed god,” Palmero told police, implying that this was no coincidence. “There were two people involved.”

At times, Palmero got exasperated by the questioning, saying of his former boss: “He now pretends that for 22 years he knew nothing about the state or management conditions of his own assets? He is the sovereign of a state! So either he is lying to serve his own interests, or he should step down—because someone like that should not be allowed to manage anything! It’s utterly ridiculous!”

Some of the prince’s allies agree with at least part of that assessment, suggesting the prince placed too much trust in familiar faces. Surrounded by old friends and advisers who echoed each other’s views, he saw little cause for doubt. The scandal, they say, jolted him into seeing things differently.

Prince Albert took the throne 20 years ago this July, promising to usher in a new era in which Monaco would stand for something more than immense wealth for its own sake. But the scandal is merely reinforcing to many outsiders the famous Monaco descriptor from Somerset Maugham: “a sunny place for shady people.”

IN A STATEMENT TO WSJ. MAGAZINE, Jean-Michel Darrois, Prince Albert’s lawyer, said the prince would not comment on the specifics of the scandal and the dispute with Palmero. “Of course, this episode has been difficult,” Darrois said. “He has taken all necessary decisions and measures to address the issues, strengthen governance and ensure full transparency. The matter is now in the hands of the judiciary, in which he has complete confidence. His focus is now fully on Monaco’s future.”

Palmero’s lawyers, Marie-Alix Canu-Bernard and Christophe Llorca, dismissed the allegations, saying that his management of the family’s assets had only ever been profitable. “The false indignation of the princely family — especially Prince Albert’s — inventing that their estate administrator of 22 years might have tried to appropriate their assets, is utterly staggering,” they said. The lawyers described the barrage of lawsuits as a “palace vendetta” aimed at silencing Palmero’s fight against corruption.

With no income tax for individuals and an obsession with privacy, Monaco is a magnet for billionaires, celebrities and high-net-worth expats looking to shelter fortunes in plain sight. Property prices regularly hit over $110,000 per square meter, making it some of the most expensive real estate on earth. The harbor in the sun-dappled Mediterranean hosts a parade of superyachts—floating mansions stacked with helipads and champagne decks, all moored just steps from the palace.

And once a year, the entire city transforms into a high-octane playground for the Monaco Grand Prix, when Formula 1 cars scream through the narrow streets, watched from private terraces and luxury suites perched above the track. 

The principality’s global status is largely the creation of Albert’s father, Prince Rainier III, who ruled for over 50 years. In 1956, he married Grace Kelly, the Hollywood starlet whose image helped cement Monaco’s mystique on the world stage until her death in a car accident in 1982....

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"Dubai government launches tokenized real estate platform"

From Ledger Insights, May 26:

Dubai has become the first city in the Middle East to implement government backed real estate tokenization, with the Dubai Land Department (DLD) launching its pilot platform through Prypco Mint. The real world asset (RWA) tokenization initiative involves putting property deeds on a blockchain, allowing investors to purchase fractional shares in Dubai properties starting from AED 2,000 ($545). The project operates through a strategic partnership between Dubai Land, Prypco, and Ctrl Alt Solutions, with regulatory oversight from the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) and the Central Bank of the UAE....

....MUCH MORE 

Starting to think there may be something to this whole tokenization thing.

Here's a quick search of the blog, most recent on top.

Capital Markets: "On-Again Off-Again US Tariffs are Back"

From Marc Chandler at Bannockburn Global Forex:

Overview: The on-again, off-again US tariffs are back on, but the judicial process is not over. On top of that, US Treasury Secretary Bessent acknowledged what many have suspected:  US-Chinese talks have stalled. The dollar, which was offered yesterday, has come back bid today. It is up against nearly all the G10 currencies. The yen is the exception, arguably helped by the firmer Tokyo CPI. The week may also be remembered for the snapping of the sharp jump in Japanese long-term yields. The 30-year yield posted its first weekly loss in five weeks, with an eight basis point pullback. The yield of the 40-year bond fell (43 bp) to post its first decline in eight weeks. The dollar is firmer against all the G10 currencies on the week but is only higher against the Canadian dollar and Japanese yen as we close out the month.

Equities in the Asia Pacific region were mostly lower. Australia and New Zealand were notable exceptions. Europe's Stoxx 600 is about 0.6% better after falling around 0.8% in the previous two sessions. US index futures are nursing small losses. Benchmark 10-year yields are 1-2 bp higher in Europe, and the 10-year US Treasury yield is up almost a basis point to near 4.43%. It is virtually flat this week coming into today. Yesterday's recovery in gold stall and it is trading inside the upper end of Thursday's range. It is struggling to sustain the foothold above $3300. It is off about 1.8% on the week, which leaves it up fractionally for the month, its fifth consecutive monthly gain. July WTI is firm in European turnover, near session highs (~$61.45). It settled near $62.35 a week ago and settled last month close to $57.60.

USD: The Dollar Index's price action was poor yesterday but there has been no follow-through selling today....

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As part of his look at today's inflation release he comments:  

The Federal Reserve targets the headline PCE deflator, but the thunder is stolen by the CPI and PPI. The PCE rarely surprises outside of a rounding adjustment....

"China & Russia will use drones ‘size of insects’ to spy on West & commit untraceable murders, ex-Google futurist warns"

From The Sun, always calm and composed, May 26:

KILLER camouflage drones the size of insects could be used by Russia and China to commit untraceable murders, an ex-Google futurist warns.

Tracey Follows, who has also worked with Amazon and Meta, warned they could even carry deadly pathogens and be used to spy on the UK. 

The warning echoes the plot of an episode of Black Mirror featuring robot bees

And it is a prediction which is a chilling echo of the Black Mirror episode "Hated in the Nation".

The near future sci-fi show envisioned of world where robot bees designed to pollinate flowers could be hijacked to commit murder.

The Future of You author told The Sun: “In time, one expects a drone to have the situational awareness to carry out an attack autonomously without a human in the loop.

“The big question is what's the payload on these drones, what are you actually attaching to the drone?

“Increasingly, over the last four or five years, I've been reading about viruses and how you can potentially attach a pathogen to these sorts of weapons.

“So not only can you identify somebody personally, you can then attack them with a virus, for example.”

Terrifyingly, she warned it could open the door for rogue nations like Russia to assassinate targets on UK soil without leaving a trace.

Moscow was infamously accused of poisoning ex-Russian spy, Sergei Skripal, in Salisbury in 2018.

....MUCH MORE

Hi-ho, it's off to FlySwatters-R-Us we go.

"Free Trade's Origin Myth"

A repost from January 2024.

I'm not sure I agree on the final destination but it's an interesting ride.

From Law & Liberty, January 2:

At Harvard University in the late 1930s, the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam used to tease the economist and future Nobel Prize winner Paul Samuelson, “Name me one proposition in all of the social sciences which is both true and non-trivial.” It took Samuelson years but, eventually, an answer occurred to him: the Ricardian theory of comparative advantage. Even if Portugal produces both cloth and wine more efficiently than England, as David Ricardo had demonstrated in 1817, the countries can still benefit from trading Portuguese wine for English cloth.

Generalized, this principle forms the basis of the economist’s case for free trade. “The theory of comparative advantage is a closely reasoned doctrine which, when properly stated, is unassailable,” Samuelson would write in his industry-leading textbook, Economics, which debuted in 1948. “With it we are able to separate out gross fallacies in the political propaganda for protective tariffs aimed at limiting imports.” Almost half a century later, Professor Paul Krugman confirmed, “the essential things to teach students are still the insights of Hume [a contemporary of Adam Smith] and Ricardo.”

Anyone who has taken an introductory course in economics learned just that, and anyone giving even cursory attention to current affairs has heard the same message repeated ad nauseam and with absolute confidence by Nobel laureates proclaiming their unanimity and mocking dissent. On free trade, said Milton Friedman, “economists have spoken with almost one voice for some two-hundred years.” Friedrich Hayek promised that “the self-regulating forces of the market will somehow bring about the required adjustments to new conditions,” including “necessary balance … between exports and imports.” Krugman concurred that “trade deficits are self-correcting” and, frustrated that “carefully explaining economic concepts like, say, comparative advantage [] doesn’t work,” he suggested, “What does work, sometimes, is ridicule. If you can make someone who imagines himself to be a deep sophisticate look silly, sometimes it gives him—or at least someone else who might be tempted to follow the same route—pause.”

After the Cold War’s end, a bipartisan consensus solidified amongst political leaders who accepted the free-trade consensus and accelerated globalization, in quick succession forming the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), launching the World Trade Organization (WTO), and granting China permanent normal trading relations (PNTR) as a WTO member. Standing in the White House briefing room in 2000 to present, a letter signed by 149 economists supporting PNTR with China, Nobel laureate Robert Solow explained, “An awful lot of the intellectual power of the economics profession has signed this letter. And it’s such a simple proposition it doesn’t really require that. You could not generate a hard exam question out of the material here.” Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers, crowed, “On this issue there has been only one answer.”

Reality, unfortunately, found a second answer. US exports and imports were roughly balanced in 1992; in 2022 the trade deficit exceeded $900 billion for the first time. Even in advanced technology products, the same 30-year period saw the United States swing from a $60 billion surplus to a nearly $250 billion deficit. Economic growth and business investment slowed, with the 2000s and 2010s turning in the worst and second-worst decades of the post-war period. In manufacturing, productivity growth turned negative—American factories needed more labor in 2022 than in 2012 to produce the same output. The crown jewels of American industry, revolutionary innovators like General Electric, Boeing, and Intel, lost their positions of global leadership. The US-China trading relationship became the most imbalanced in world history and cost millions of American jobs. Tesla Motors, an icon of contemporary American innovation, reports that most of its key stakeholders reside in China and CEO Elon Musk pledged in July to enhance “core socialist values.”

* * *

Americans are rightly confused and frustrated by the failure, especially given the confidence with which a different outcome was promised. The political system has begun to respond. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton both campaigned against the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2016 and, as president, Trump imposed harsh tariffs on China that President Biden has kept in place. But within the Biden administration, an old guard continues to advocate a very different agenda. In June, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen testified before Congress, “We gain and China gains from trade and investment that is as open as possible.”

In academia, meanwhile, most economists refuse to acknowledge any problem at all. A 2012 survey by the University of Chicago presented 35 prominent economists with the statement, “Trade with China makes most Americans better off because, among other advantages, they can buy goods that are made or assembled more cheaply in China.” All 35 agreed. In his 2021 book, The Wall and the Bridge, Professor Glenn Hubbard, chair of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, suggested, “Let’s go back to Econ 101.” Citing “classical economist David Ricardo’s idea of ‘comparative advantage,’” Hubbard explained that “with two countries, if each specializes in the good or goods they produce more efficiently, there are gains from trade.”

In the years ahead, America will continue to turn away from the excesses of globalization, as it should. Doing so effectively will require not only the understanding that something has gone wrong, but also an understanding of what went wrong and why. Ideally, economists might come to recognize their own mistakes and participate in this rebalancing. But to paraphrase Krugman, if careful explanation does not prompt a rethinking, then ridicule will be well deserved.

What economists have missed in their blind embrace of free trade is a two-fold problem, part conceptual and part technical. The conceptual problem is quite straightforward: making things matter. This should not be a controversial assertion, but in fact, many economists will take issue with it. Michael Boskin, chair of President George H. W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, famously quipped, “Computer chips, potato chips, what’s the difference?” Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), says of the United States being a manufacturing center, “we should not want to be.” Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, has argued that “what’s really going on here” with concern for American manufacturing is “the general fetish for keeping white males of low education outside the cities in the powerful positions they’re in in the US.”

But a nation’s capital investments, the capabilities it develops in its firms and workers, the supply chains it fosters, and the types of research and development it pursues all have important implications for the trajectory of its growth, the opportunities available to its citizens, and its power on the global stage. What is made in a country determines what else is made in the country; and what will be made tomorrow.

Andy Grove, the brilliant engineer who led Intel in its heyday, warned after his retirement about the folly of believing that a nation could offshore manufacturing while keeping innovation at home. “Our pursuit of our individual businesses, which often involves transferring manufacturing and a great deal of engineering out of the country, has hindered our ability to bring innovations to scale at home,” he wrote. “Without scaling, we don’t just lose jobs—we lose our hold on new technologies. Losing the ability to scale will ultimately damage our capacity to innovate.” The successful transition from prototype to production is as challenging and vital as the flash of brilliance in the garage. Without capacity for the former, both the inspiration for and value of the latter diminishes quickly.

With its infamous wine and cloth, the Ricardian model elides this challenge—specializing in either product might be equally valuable. But change the model to advanced semiconductors and cloth, and the benefit to a nation of abandoning its role in the chip industry to focus on weaving is harder to discern. Complicating matters further, once the products at issue are of different strategic value, any nation might rationally place its finger on the scale to gain comparative advantage in that which it prefers to produce. Another nation trusting that it would benefit from free trade regardless would soon find itself specializing in that which no one else wants. The most technologically advanced economy could find itself running a $250 billion deficit in advanced technology products, incapable of fabricating advanced chips that it pioneered. In that country, national security would be put at risk, productivity growth and innovation would decline, and workers and their families and communities would ultimately pay the price in worsening economic prospects.

A second, more technical problem compounds the first. Trading cloth for semiconductors might not strengthen the economy, but it would at least yield a hot labor market for shepherds. This assumption is fundamental to Ricardo’s model, and originates even earlier, in The Wealth of Nations, where Adam Smith wrote, “If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry, employed in a way in which we have some advantage” (emphasis added). John Stuart Mill, elaborating on Ricardo’s analysis, described international trade as “always [] in reality, an actual trucking of one commodity against another.” What happens to the model, though, if goods are exchanged not for goods but for assets? Liverpool’s factories could relocate to Lisbon. Portugal could make the wine, the cloth, and the semiconductors and trade them to England in return for prime London real estate, or perhaps bonds committing the British Crown to payment at some future date....

....MUCH MORE

Also at Law & Liberty:

Responses to this
Jan 10, 2024
Feeble Forays Against Free Trade

Donald J. Boudreaux


And:
Book Review

A Search for the Economics GOAT

John O. McGinnis

Thursday, May 29, 2025

The Grandson Of President John Tyler, In Office 1841 - 1845, Died On Sunday, May 25, 2025

Okay, one more backward-looking post. From the New York Post, May 28, 2025: 

Grandson of 10th US President John Tyler, who left the White House 180 years ago, dead at 96

The grandson of the 10th President of the United States, John Tyler, has died at 96 — 180 years after his grandfather was last in the White House.

Harrison Ruffin Tyler, the son of President Tyler’s 13th child, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, died on Sunday evening at a Virginia nursing home, ending the last living link to an 18th-century [sic] presidential administration.

When he was born on Nov. 9, 1928, his father was 75 years old....

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"Energy Dept. Unveils Supercomputer That Merges With A.I." (DELL; NVDA)

I believe this is were we came in.

From the New York Times, May 29: 

The new supercomputer shows the increasing desire of government labs to adopt more technologies from commercial artificial intelligence systems.

Scientific computing and artificial intelligence were once separate worlds, using different kinds of calculations on distinctly different hardware. But the two fields are steadily merging, as shown by a massive new machine coming to Berkeley, Calif.

On Thursday, the Department of Energy’s laboratory near the University of California, Berkeley, said it had selected Dell Technologies to deliver its next flagship supercomputer in 2026. The system will use Nvidia chips tailored for A.I. calculations and the simulations common to energy research and other scientific fields.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory expects the new machine — to be named for Jennifer Doudna, a Berkeley biochemist who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize for chemistry — to offer more than a tenfold speed boost over the lab’s most powerful current system. If fully outfitted, the machine could be the Energy Department’s biggest resource for tasks like training A.I. models, said Jonathan Carter, associate laboratory director for computing sciences at the Berkeley center.

The supercomputer stands out for its technology choices, which indicate the growing desire for government labs to adopt more technologies from commercial A.I. systems. Nvidia chips, though widely used by big cloud companies as well as in supercomputers, were passed over by the Energy Department for three previous record-setting machines that were assembled by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Dell has hardly been a player in the highest end of the supercomputer market, but it has had success in large commercial A.I. installations.

At the March 2024 GTC Jensen Huang literally turned the spotlight on Michael Dell who was in the audience for Huang's keynote speech.

Here's our first NVIDIA post, Sunday May 17, 2015:

Nvidia Wants to Be the Brains Of Your Autonomous Car (NVDA)

We've mentioned, usually in the context of the Top 500* fastest supercomputers, that:
Long time readers know we have a serious interest in screaming fast computers and try to get to the Top500 list a couple times a year. Here is a computer that was at the top of that list, the fastest computer in the world just four years ago. And it's being shut down.
Technology changes pretty fast. 
That was from a 2013 post.
Among the fastest processors in the business are the one's originally developed for video games and known as Graphics Processing Units or GPU's. Since Nvidia released their Tesla hardware in 2008 hobbyists (and others) have used GPU's to build personal supercomputers.
Here's Nvidias Build your Own page.
Or have your tech guy build one for you.

In addition Nvidia has very fast connectors they call NVLink.
Using a hybrid combination of IBM Central Processing Units (CPU's) and Nvidia's GPU's, all hooked together with the NVLink, Oak Ridge National Laboratory is building what will be the world's fastest supercomputer when it debuts in 2018.

As your kid plays Grand Theft Auto.

From IEEE Spectrum, April 9, 2015:

Nvidia Wants to Build the Robocar's Brain...

The stock had closed the previous Friday at $21.30. [multiply today's close, (May 29, 2025) $139.19 x 40 to account for the stock splits et voilà!: $5567.60]

Our first post on AI was December 2013's "Why Is Machine Learning (CS 229) The Most Popular Course At Stanford?"

 And with a few more posts in 2014, including:

it was off to the races. But this week's backward-looking recollections have to end: 

June 11, 2019
Securitise Everything: Debits, Credits, Whatev

I just realized I am in danger of becoming an old woman.

Yesterday FT Alphaville had three posts:

What a debut securitisation tells us about fintech
Is Lufthansa an e-money issuer?
Can air miles points be securitised?  
That grabbed my eye but rather than sticking to the topics at hand my mind wandered to Carl Icahn's time at Trans World Airlines.

Old Carl had bought the storied carrier with unsecured junk bonds and famously proceeded to mortgage everything he could including one "senior secured" issue backed by collateral that included spare light bulbs for the planes. The TWA light bulb bonds.

TWA went broke, I don't know what became of the light bulbs, but combined with reminiscences of the copper trading glory days of 15 years ago I thought, "Uh oh":

https://painting-planet.com/images/8/image379.jpg

That's Vasili Maksimov's "Everything is in the past" (1889), which the Russian State Tretyakov Gallery describes as:
.... "Everything is in the past" , where the artist shows us one of the slowly disappearing "nests of the gentry", tackling the themes of a elegaic country estate life, senility and irreversibility of time.....
Yikes, I am not ready for samovars and knitting needles. "Hello fellow kids, what is new with blockchain?"
Although, come to think of it, maybe some tea would be nice. 
 
If interested here is a story on the Light Bulb Bonds.

Sherwood News Says Nice Things About Nvidia

A twofer. First up, (both May 29): 

Nvidia is still the Bo Jackson of stocks
Palantir brags about its score on the “Rule of 40” — but NVDA just put up 69% revenue growth on huge margins. That’s a Bo-level double threat.

There’s only one professional athlete that’s been named an All-Star in two major North American sports.

His name is Bo Jackson, and in a remarkable injury-shortened career, he swung, ran, threw, and slid his way into the coveted All-Star rosters of the MLB and NFL. In the world of investing, Nvidia continues to pull off an almost equally impressive feat.

The Rule of 40

When I first failed to resist the pull of the stock market sports analogy last year, noting that Nvidia’s profitable growth was starting to feel very Bo-like, it seemed hard to imagine Nvidia would continue to advance at a similarly blistering pace. But, amid the DeepSeek panic, margin blips, export restrictions in one of its largest markets, and supply chain bottlenecks, Nvidia continues to deliver that rarest of combinations: growth and profitability.

In its Q1 results yesterday, NvidiaNVDA $139.19 (3.25%) posted a strong revenue beat, with sales coming in at $44.1 billion, up 69% year on year. Over the last four quarters, Nvidia’s net profit margin (pretax) has been 60%. That’s a Jackson-level dual threat that’s entirely unparalleled in large-cap stocks in the public market today, and it goes a long way toward explaining why, even at an eye-watering $3.3 trillion valuation, investors have been bidding up Nvidia’s stock on Thursday.

We can get some helpful context on just how good that is from the “Rule of 40” — a helpful heuristic typically applied to fast-growing startups by venture capital investors that posits that a company’s growth rate plus its margin should equal at least 40%. To be considered “healthy,” you need to be growing fast, solidly profitable, or some decent combination of the two.

Nvidia’s score over the last 12 months would be 69% + 60% = 129%. Compared to its tech peers in the S&P 500 index, most of which unsurprisingly don’t meet that very high bar, that is unrivaled. Meta’sMETA $644.51 (0.14%) is a solid 60%, but that’s still less than half of Jensen Huang’s company. Apple, one of the more mature members of the Magnificent 7, scored 37%, made up of 5% growth and a 32% margin.

Nvidia growth + margin
Sherwood News

PalantirPLTR $123.24 (-0.42%) is a particularly interesting company, with its executive team routinely embracing the Rule of 40 as a yardstick. Indeed, the company’s latest quarterly results start with this opening sentence:

“Our Rule of 40 score increased to 83% in the last quarter, once again breaking the metric.”

That particular calculation, however, uses Palantir’s “adjusted operating margin,” and it’s no surprise, of course, that margins tend to be bigger when you “adjust” some costs out of them. Per my calculations, which use the plain old bottom line pretax, Palantir’s score is more like 59% — still very healthy, but not quite as lights out as CEO Alex Karp would perhaps like....

....MUCH MORE

And: 

The “most bullish thing” UBS heard Nvidia say

They also said their customers are transitioning from training to inference at a very rapid clip: 

Nvidia Earnings Call Transcript—Q1 2026, May 28, 2025 (NVDA)

"CMA CGM Invests $600 Million in New Vietnam Terminal as Trade Surges"

Going where the action is. And going large.

From gCaptain, May 28:

CMA CGM Group has signed a partnership agreement with Saigon Newport Corporation (SNP) to develop a new deep-water terminal in Haiphong, northern Vietnam, marking a significant expansion of its presence in Southeast Asia.

The project, representing a $600 million investment, will see the development of Lach Huyen terminals 7&8 in the strategically positioned Lach Huyen area. The facility is designed to handle 1.9 million TEUs and is scheduled to commence operations in 2028.

This development comes at a crucial time for Vietnam’s economy, which has seen dramatic growth in container volumes, particularly in the northern region which has emerged as one of Southeast Asia’s fastest-growing economic zones....

....MUCH MORE

Whoa!—Chinese Electric Vehicles: "The Evergrande of the automotive industry already exists; it just hasn't collapsed yet."

Following on and expounding upon Monday's "Chinese EV Stocks Tumble After BYD Slashes Prices Up to 35%".

From ZeroHedge, May 29:

"Race To The Bottom": BYD Price Slashing To Prompt Chinese EV Consolidation 

BYD’s aggressive discount campaign is shaking up China’s EV market, pushing rivals to slash prices and raising concerns of an industry-wide “race to the bottom,” according to Nikkei Asia.

Since January, BYD has launched repeated limited-time offers. Its latest, running through June, cuts prices by up to 34% across 22 EV and hybrid models, with its Seagull now starting at just $7,700. Morningstar’s Vincent Sun said investors are worried this signals a prolonged price war. “I believe sales targets are the main driver behind this,” he said.

BYD aims to sell 5.5 million vehicles in 2025, including 800,000 overseas. But its stock fell over 8% Monday and continued sliding Tuesday after the discount news.

Great Wall Motor chairman Wei Jianjun hinted at growing debt in the industry, saying, “The Evergrande of the automotive industry already exists; it just hasn't collapsed yet.” Many believe he was referring to BYD, whose debt ratio stood at 70.7% in March. BYD’s Li Yunfei appeared to hit back with a cryptic social media post: “A dog can bite a person! But a person cannot bite a dog!”

Nikkei writes that other carmakers quickly followed BYD’s lead. Geely’s Galaxy brand launched deals with discounts up to 20,000 yuan, while Changan and Leapmotor also cut prices. Rising inventories are partly to blame—China had 3.5 million unsold vehicles in April, a 57-day supply, the highest since late 2023. BYD alone reported 154.4 billion yuan in inventory, up 33% from the previous quarter....

....MORE 

Our out-the-door comment on October 2024's "Chartology — Breakout or Breakdown: Tesla (deliveries reported tomorrow, robotaxi etc.) TSLA":

One quibble. The line "Tesla has relied on price cuts since late 2022..." reads like a bad thing but the fact of the matter is that the entire industry has been cutting prices and Tesla getting out in front of that reality has kept them competitive in the battery-electric-vehicle business.

As we've been saying for quite a while now, Mr. Musk saw something a couple years ago that led him to a) the price cuts and production efficiencies that are proving crucial to survival in not just EV's but in the wider automobile market as well. Volkswagen talking about possibly laying off 30,000 of their German employees was inconceivable five years ago. And b) whatever it was he saw also led to the emphasizing of things they been working on for a decade: robotaxis and AI and supercomputers and robots.

So, for patient reader, having read this far, here's my two cents worth: 

Deliveries will be in-line this month and the next few months and the robotaxi unveil will be written up as a bust. The people who write the headlines hate Elon Musk and nothing he does will ever, ever change that. The financial question is: will the self-driving taxis be contributing to sales and earnings in two years?

Based on the fact that Waymo is now booking 100,000 rides per week I think the answer is yes but your mileage may vary. To repeat the comment on the April earnings call transcript:

Personally I think Musk is going to pull it off, but that's just me—perhaps informed by posting on the company and its stock since before the June 2010 share flotation (which, adjusted for the 5:1 and 3:1 stock splits gives a $1.133 IPO price)—however, there are plenty of other opinions to choose from if one doesn't care for that one....
Earlier in 2024:
"Biden slaps tariffs on nonexistent Chinese EV imports"
*****
....And that is why Elon Musk was so focused on the cost-cutting that allowed the price-cutting that kept Tesla competitive for the last eighteen months.

In January 2023 this bit of nonsense was making the rounds:

Tesla is about to experience the seven perils of discounting

It went in the same folder as 2015's:

Tesla's Battery: No Thanks

 One more, also 2024:

"Tesla’s in China – It’s just a question of how long" (TSLA)

The writer appears to think Mr. Musk is a naïf or even a Candide, blissfully unaware that all may not be for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

Wrongo, Bucko. Musk has a minor depression, possibly akin to Churchill's “Black Dog” that leads him to catastrophize worst case scenarios without succumbing to the debilitating effects (learned helplessness, hopelessness, suicide) you'd look for in a victim of a major depression.

He would be a good risk manager. The ketamine probably helps.....

and the outro:

As Intel's Andy Grove famously said:

“Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. 
Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. 
Only the paranoid survive.”

Mr. Musk has his blind spots but China sneaking up on Tesla probably isn't one of them. He knows that Western companies will eventually lose the battle for electric vehicle dominance and something that he saw sometime in the last couple years seems to have scared him into action on the fronts where Tesla has a competitive advantage: access to some truly brilliant people; artificial intelligence facilitated by a long history with Nvidia and autonomous vehicles.

So again, we wish him luck, and think he'll succeed but this stuff is serious business.  

 Again, we wish him luck.