Quotes About Economy

The economy is not immutable; it's not about natural laws. It's about rules, and we make the rules.

For a Canadian, natural resources were a good fit.

It began when we shifted, in the words of the historian Charles Maier, from an "empire of production" to an "empire of consumption." By the end of the Vietnam War, when the costs of the war ate away at Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and domestic oil production began its steady, inexorable decline, we saw our country transformed from one that primarily produced to one that primarily consumed. We started borrowing to maintain a lifestyle we could no longer afford.

only three corporations—Cargill, Archers Daniel Midland Company, and Bunge (all American)—control 90 percent of the global grain trade.

The Dutch company ASML builds 100 percent of the world's extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, without which cutting-edge chips are simply impossible to make. OPEC's 40 percent share of world oil production looks unimpressive by comparison

The second means of building a fortune through theft was to take advantage of sky-high inflation rates.

China now spends more money each year importing chips than it spends on oil.

Chips from Taiwan provide 37 percent of the world's new computing power each year. Two Korean companies produce 44 percent of the world's memory chips. The Dutch company ASML builds 100 percent of the world's extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, without which cutting-edge chips are simply impossible to make. OPEC's 40 percent share of world oil production looks unimpressive by comparison.

Many Russians had supported macroeconomic stabilization because they believed it was a necessary foundation for economic progress. Kudrin counseled continued caution. But many Russians believed that, because the country had sorted out its finances, it was time to reap the benefits of growth.

Integrated circuits made up 15 percent of South Korea's exports in 2017; 17 percent of Singapore's; 19 percent of Malaysia's; 21 percent of the Philippines'; and 36 percent of Taiwan's. Made

Only 8 percent of large businesses paid taxes in cash, while the rest paid in kind or not at all.

The oil industry—which in productivity terms was one of the great success stories of privatization—also began a slow but steady renationalization

The government made no attempt to raise the magnitude of revenues that would have been necessary to rebuild a welfare state, for example, or to hike investment in health and education.

billion in 2017, the year of Xi's Davos debut—was far larger than Saudi Arabia's export of oil

staggering. China's import of chips—$260 billion in 2017, the year of Xi's Davos debut—was far larger than Saudi Arabia's export of oil or Germany's export of cars. China spends more money buying chips each year than the entire global trade in aircraft. No product is more central to international trade than semiconductors.

China had driven U.S. solar panel manufacturing out of business. Couldn't it do the same in semiconductors? "This

globalization" of chip fabrication hadn't occurred; "Taiwanization

China now spends more money each year importing chips than it spends

Semiconductors weren't simply the "cornerstone" of "everything we're competing on," as one administration official had put it. They could also be a devastatingly powerful weapon.

Most of the world's GDP is produced with devices that rely on semiconductors. For a product that didn't exist seventy-five years ago, this is an extraordinary

TSMC builds almost all the world's most advanced processor chips.

Newspaper Guangming Ribao set the tone, calling on readers in 1985 to abandon "the formula of 'the first machine imported, the second machine imported, and the third machine imported' " and replace it with " 'the first machine imported, the second made in China, and the third machine exported.

Unlike oil, though, the supply of chips is monopolized by China's geopolitical rivals.

The chip industry faced an organized assault by the world's second-largest economy and the one-party state that ruled it.