Top Links 329 Two-nanometer chips, Chechen yoghurt, low-carbon technology trade & the history of ordoliberalism

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Rabbi with Torah, 1999, oil on canvas by Hyman Bloom, collection of the artist. Born to working class, religious Jews in Latvia in 1913, Bloom hoped to be a Rabbi. At seven, he arrived in Boston with his father and two of his brothers. Exhibited alongside Jackson Pollock and Picasso, he frequently painted rabbis as well as mutilated bodies — twin images of Jewish life in Eastern Europe — while also developing that 1960s American interest in Eastern forms of Mysticism, including sketches produced while on LSD. That synthesis of the rich aesthetics of his European past and American present is well captured in this essay by Susan Saccoccia.

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The next technological revolution

Any company that opens up a technological lead in the next generation of advanced semiconductors will be well placed to dominate an industry that pulled in well over $500bn in global chip sales last year. That is projected to grow further due to a surge in demand for the data centre chips that power generative AI services. TSMC, which dominates the global market in processors, has already shown the process test results for its “N2” — or 2 nanometre — prototypes to some of its biggest customers, including Apple and Nvidia, according to two people with direct knowledge of the discussions. But two people close to Samsung said the Korean chipmaker was offering cut-price versions of its latest 2 nanometre prototypes in an effort to attract the interest of big-name customers including Nvidia. “Samsung sees 2 nanometre as a game-changer,” said James Lim, analyst at US hedge fund Dalton Investments. “But people are still doubtful it can execute the migration better than TSMC.”

Source: FT

Political capitalism

What happens when Chechen warlords get their hands on a major French dairy company? Not much changes, it turns out — take from that what you will!

When a group of Chechens with links to their region’s strongman leader Ramzan Kadyrov showed up this summer to seize control of Danone’s operations in Russia, the company began receiving frightened calls from its staff in the country. The French dairy group had been close to finalising a Rothschild-brokered deal to leave Russia when the Kremlin declared its local operations, along with those of Danish brewer Carlsberg, had been placed under “temporary external management”. But while the designation sounded the death knell for Carlsberg’s role in its Russian business, two of whose top former executives now sit in prison, what has followed for Danone has been more of a bizarre stasis. Much of life at its Russian dairy operations continues as before, with the Chechens largely running the expropriated factories in name only and previous leadership still involved in much of the day-to-day management. Danone’s new Chechen bosses are “running it basically as an MBA case, fairly professional and without raising too many flags — pulling the guns out and stuff like that,” according to one person close to Russia’s government subcommittee on western assets. “It is extremely amicable,” the person said. Danone “are not telling the world they have been mistreated. They don’t sound like they are offended”.

Russia accounted for about 5 per cent of the group’s €27.6bn in annual revenues in 2022, making the French company among the most exposed of European consumer groups to the war. The yoghurt maker, Russia’s biggest dairy business, first entered the market three decades ago after the fall of the Soviet Union. As other western companies pulled out after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, Danone initially said it would remain in Russia while halting investments, arguing that it had a responsibility to its 7,000 local employees and the dairy farmers who supplied its 13 factory sites. 

Source: FT

Hyman Bloom, The Hull, 1952, Oil on canvas, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts, Gift of the William H. Lane Foundation. © Stella Bloom Trust Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The green tech boom

Trade in LCT [low carbon technology] products—such as solar panels, electric vehicles, and wind turbines—has been growing steadily both in absolute terms and as a share of total trade. Between 1999 and 2021, trade in LCTs grew from $200 billion (a 3.5 percent share of total trade) to $1.1 trillion (a 5.1 percent share), growing at about 8 percent per annum. This trend has continued since the Paris Agreement, despite a slowdown in global trade (goods trade grew by just 2 percent per annum from 2015 to 2021).

Alright, but who is benefitting?

Between 2015 and 2021, developing countries excluding China grew their LCT exports by 8 percent per annum and imports by 4.9 per annum. However, their share in LCT exports remains flat at about 10 percent and their share of imports has declined from about 21 to 18 percent. This is disappointing given the need to rapidly diffuse LCT in developing countries. Moreover, more than 60 percent of green patents during 1980- 2000 were filed in just nine countries (G7 plus China and Korea). Additionally, production stages of LCT are concentrated in a small number of countries, notably advanced economies plus China. China is the largest trader in LCT followed by Germany, Japan, Korea, and the United States. The top 10 exporters of LCT collectively account for 34 percent of global exports and 27 percent of imports, shares of which have barely changed since 2000.

Source: IMF Staff Climate Notes, by Simon Black, Ian W.H. Parry, Karlygash Zhunussova

Russian oil discounts

Hyman Bloom, Fish, Still Life, 1953, charcoal on paper (Photograph J.Cook)

Economic power

One central division between Right and Left might seem to be whether something called “the economy” is understood in capitalist societies as a space of consensual and mutually beneficial encounters (the free market Right), or a space of power relations (the Left). In fact, though, theories crucial to the production and reproduction of the existing social order have taken very seriously the role of power. We hear more about neoliberalism than ordoliberalism, and the former is often described as anti-statist, but to understand (say) the design of the contemporary European Union it helps to delve into German debates under the Nazis and beyond, where the state’s construction of a set of rules to enable private competition was the focus of the day. Raphael Fèvre’s book with Oxford University Press shows how important theories of power were to that moment:

Stefan Link’s review in the Journal of Modern History offers a very useful framing:

Hyman Bloom, Turban Squash, 1959, oil on canvas (Photograph J.Cook)

This holiday season, give the gift of analysis in a confusing world: