President Joe Biden signs an executive order requiring the assessment of the state of the semiconductor industry

[Entropy.]

first post hope i did it right

Summary

On February 24th, US President Joe Biden signed an executive order requiring a 100-day review of the global supply chains in 4 key industries- the most prominent of them seemingly being the semiconductor industry- in an effort to assess and combat the ongoing shortcomings that these industries are facing. The order also calls for a separate, year-long review of six broader supply chains: defense, public health, communications technology, energy, transportation and food production. This comes after Mr. Biden reportedly discussed the issue in the Oval Office earlier on the 24th with nearly a dozen Republican and Democratic members of Congress. President Biden Acknowledged that this executive order would not immediately relive the ongoing shortage, but stressed the importance of addressing supply issues to avoid future crises. 

 

Quotes

Quote

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden signed an executive order Wednesday requiring a review of the global supply chains in key industries in an effort to boost domestic production and avoid shortages in critical goods amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The president ordered yearlong reviews of six sectors and a 100-day review of four classes of products where American manufacturers rely on imports: semiconductors, high-capacity batteries, pharmaceuticals and their active ingredients, and critical minerals and strategic materials, like rare earths.

Biden's action was spurred in part by the global semiconductor shortage, which began shortly after the coronavirus pandemic hit last year. Semiconductors, commonly known as chips and used in a range of products including cellphones and computers, and were in high demand as consumers around the world purchased equipment to work from home. The shortage has severely impacted automakers and other manufacturers and led to slowdowns in production.

The executive order calls for a 100-day review to assess vulnerabilities and areas for improvement of supply chains for four areas: pharmaceuticals, rare earth minerals, semiconductor chips and large-capacity batteries.

"We all recognize that the particular problem will not be solved immediately. In the meantime, we are reaching out to our allies, semiconductor companies and others in the supply chain, to ramp up production to help us resolve the bottlenecks now," Biden said.
'The order also calls for a separate, year-long review of six broader supply chains: defense, public health, communications technology, energy, transportation and food production.'

“Right now, semiconductor manufacturing is a dangerous weak spot in our economy and in our national security,” Mr. Schumer said. “Our auto industry is facing significant chip shortages. This is a technology the United States created; we ought to be leading the world in it. The same goes for building-out of 5G, the next generation telecommunications network. There is bipartisan interest on both these issues.”

 

My thoughts

Obviously I beileve this is positive news and might help relives the stress on the industry, but even long-term I seriously doubt that the Biden administration will be able to make much of an impact for the consumer, at least independently. I'd like to see what *specifically* are the concerns of the Biden administration, and a detailed plan specifying what they intend to do. Even if that were to happen, at this pace the semiconductor industry might not benefit much from government support- it might just come too slowly. This 'review' could take 3 months on it's lonesome. Even with bipartisan support aid might not seriously arrive to the semiconductor industry until q3 or q4 of 2021. 

 

Sources

Biden signs executive order targeting America's supply chains in critical areas (yahoo.com)
Biden, Harris meet bipartisan group of lawmakers on supply chain issues, sign executive order | Fox Business
Amid Shortfalls, Biden Signs Executive Order to Bolster Critical Supply Chains (msn.com)
Biden signs executive order targeting America's supply chains in critical areas (msn.com)

Edit: If a mod sees this this is gonna get locked: 3/2/2021 at 12:05pm pst

[The_russian]

 

18 minutes ago, Brok3n But who cares? said:

Even if that were to happen, at this pace the semiconductor industry might not benefit much from government support- it might just come too slowly. This 'review' could take 3 months on it's lonesome. Even with bipartisan support aid might not seriously arrive to the semiconductor industry until q3 or q4 of 2021. 

If you read the article, the administration isn't trying to solve the problem as soon as possible, rather they are trying to prevent a similar situation from happening again in the future. It's even in the quote:

Quote

"We all recognize that the particular problem will not be solved immediately.

 

By the way, there was a thread created when it was announced that an executive order would be issued, but it got locked because people focused on the political side of it instead of the tech side: 

 

[Entropy.]

7 minutes ago, The_russian said:

 

If you read the article, the administration isn't trying to solve the problem as soon as possible, rather they are trying to prevent a similar situation from happening again in the future. It's even in the quote:

 

By the way, there was a thread created when it was announced that an executive order would be issued, but it got locked because people focused on the political side of it instead of the tech side: 

 

I realize, I'm just not focusing on the prevention of this situation in the future, I'm personally more interested in the implications it has for consumers. In my post, I also brought your point up- in the summary that I wrote out, not the quotes.  There's a reason why I only mentioned this when it came to my thoughts lol. As for the rest, I'm unsure if that means I'm violating the guidelines-which was my main concern- but thank you for the information regardless. 

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, The_russian said:

By the way, there was a thread created when it was announced that an executive order would be issued, but it got locked because people focused on the political side of it instead of the tech side: 

I think a good idea would be to not allow titles which draws attention to some politician. For example "President Joe Biden signs X" or "Trump administration does Y" are far more likely to become a shit throwing competition between the two US political parties than if the threads were just titled "US government does X" or "Y is happened".

[The_russian]

1 minute ago, LAwLz said:

I think a good idea would be to not allow titles which draws attention to some politician. For example "President Joe Biden signs X" or "Trump administration does Y" are far more likely to become a shit throwing competition between the two US political parties than if the threads were just titled "US government does X" or "Y is happened".

That would be an interesting thing to try, I personally don't think it would improve things much. It usually starts with one post in the thread that is semi-political but not bad on it's own, then people respond to it and the thread slowly turns into two or three people arguing between each other and it all goes down the shitter. I'm not sure that not mentioning a specific politician will fix that, some people just like to argue and somehow feel that this forum is a good place to convince others of why the politicians on "their side" are angels and the ones on the "other side" are trying to end the world. 

[Mling]

It's obviously a matter of national security to have manufacturing functioning, and they are looking at defence, so we will likely never hear of this again. Have you seen all those official information requests where almost every word is blacked out. That is what will happen here.

[Taf the Ghost]

Tech Sector and Wall Street were massive donors to the campaign. This is simply just prelude to government funding of certain things in the future, among other bailouts. You can normally track who's going to get money by who was donating. That said, the actual issue is pretty easy to explain. The industry is "fragile" to Chinese production. Any solution requires updates to certain laws to require a certain % of production to be domestic. (This exists for anything that touches military spending, generally.)

 

The actual question is if the power circles in Wall Street that caused this problem are still around. The process of Financialization and world-shifting of manufacturing away from Western countries wasn't a natural economic consequence. It was wholly engineered so that Banking interests would both make more money and gain significant control over all companies. This required a lot of money changing hands. How much of that was legal is open to a lot of debate. The end result is the dividing lines we see today. 

 

All we'll likely see is Intel getting a tax credits or something for their nodes.

[CarlBar]

There's really nothing that can be done, expanding capacity means more machines, and the machines are made in Europe where the US government has little hard influence.The US would have to somehow get domestic production of the machines going and subsidise the costs of new foundries because even if he machines where available i doubt many of the existing manufacturers actually have the capital available to them to fund the construction of new foundries on their own.

[Bombastinator]

On 2/25/2021 at 1:27 AM, LAwLz said:

I think a good idea would be to not allow titles which draws attention to some politician. For example "President Joe Biden signs X" or "Trump administration does Y" are far more likely to become a shit throwing competition between the two US political parties than if the threads were just titled "US government does X" or "Y is happened".

Not wrong.  Funny though

[Mark Kaine]

well if they want to change that they need to have own production facilities as of now relying on a handful of companies that are far far far away and not even in allied territories seems just like asking for trouble - and that goes for every country that relies on foreign production lines for crucial tech not just the USA. 

 

My thoughts about this subject are simple: good luck with that! 

[Jtalk4456]

On 2/25/2021 at 2:45 AM, Mling said:

It's obviously a matter of national security to have manufacturing functioning, and they are looking at defence, so we will likely never hear of this again. Have you seen all those official information requests where almost every word is blacked out. That is what will happen here.

I disagree in a sense, you're talking about specific information requests from citizens using the Freedom of Information Act. That's not what's happening here. The president is not requesting information from himself, he's setting up an assessment into multiple large scale issues affecting economy, security, health, and a lot of other general outcomes. TLDR he's basically running a pop quiz to see what the country has learned and where we need more work. he's using this specific issue as a reasoning and going a lot further. Will wee see much of this report? yes and no. All the details, nah that'll be absent, but really we don't need to see the numbers from every chip factory sorted by this and that. This isn't really intended to be a public thing, it's the president forcing a bigger briefing than normal. He just took over so no matter how good or bad you think he is, he hasn't been privy to a lot of things up until now. The simplified findings will likely be released in some form or another, but this isn't really for us to see, this is for him to learn enough to do a better job

[thechinchinsong]

19 hours ago, StDragon said:

It's all part of the same scheme; outsourcing production and insourcing cheap slave-wage labor. Our politicians don't listen to the people, they listen to their corporate masters whom own and control them.

 

Anyways, the toothpaste is out of the tube. It will take at least 5+ years before a plant comes online should a fab break soil today. Lots of people warned about this scenario decades ago. Well, here we are in the year 2021.

Well, seeing as this is a "100-day review" and doesn't actually break any soil, I fail to see how this is a problem. As for outsourcing production and insourcing cheap slave-wage labor, I fail to see how you could do both. If you outsource production, there isn't any demand for labor. If you insource cheap labor, there is natural incentive to insource production due to lower labor costs. Building fabs in the US builds production with the incentive to hire cheap labor. Even if you look at it from the "politicians" point of view, it doesn't make sense to do both, unless you believe that politicians have an agenda specifically to destroy the US.

[wamred]

I don’t really know what to think about this, I mean it’s a good thing but are they really going to be able to do anything? 

[williamcll]

More importantly, would it lower the price of All-American made products though once the order is put into action?

[Video Beagle]

On 2/28/2021 at 6:37 AM, wamred said:

I don’t really know what to think about this, I mean it’s a good thing but are they really going to be able to do anything? 

It's basically a neutral to good thing. It's the US Government turning some attention towards learning about the semi-conductor industry, it's shortfalls, what can be done from a government point of view to help it. 

What they can do in the short run isn't really known...or the long run for that matter....so that's what this will be about.  At worst, they find everything people have said on this forum and life goes on. At best, they find places they can help (ie. throw money at it) and life goes on.

[LogicalDrm]

*** Thread cleaned ***

 

This is your one and only warning. If thread needs to be cleaned again, it will be locked. No politics, no off topic. You can only talk about this political decision, reasons on why it was made and what are its ramifications. Talking about immigration or other political decisions is not why this topic was posted.

[RejZoR]

I hope they sack this nonsense so we get Huawei back in the game. One may not like them for whatever reason, but no one can deny they were pushing mobile industry forward with full force. Since Huawei's removal from market, it feels like entire industry is stagnating.

[LAwLz]

4 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

I hope they sack this nonsense so we get Huawei back in the game. One may not like them for whatever reason, but no one can deny they were pushing mobile industry forward with full force. Since Huawei's removal from market, it feels like entire industry is stagnating.

I disagree that the Huawei ban caused the market to stagnate, but I agree that Huawei should be allowed "back in the game" again.

The entire ban was bullshit from the beginning if you ask me. Just the US wanting to exercise their powers over China.

[StDragon]

5 hours ago, RejZoR said:

I hope they sack this nonsense so we get Huawei back in the game. One may not like them for whatever reason, but no one can deny they were pushing mobile industry forward with full force. Since Huawei's removal from market, it feels like entire industry is stagnating.

That's not in the national security interest of the US, so it won't happen. 

[RejZoR]

1 hour ago, StDragon said:

That's not in the national security interest of the US, so it won't happen. 

US's interest in national security is so F up they couldn't find their own ass. Like how they sacked Kaspersky for discovering NSA's contractors handling hack tools. But US can't punish their own so the blamed Kaspersky. And everyone believed that crap.

[StDragon]

50 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

US's interest in national security is so F up they couldn't find their own ass. Like how they sacked Kaspersky for discovering NSA's contractors handling hack tools. But US can't punish their own so the blamed Kaspersky. And everyone believed that crap.

Oh, I don't disagree there's an element of hypocrisy wafting in the air. But national security is all relative. It's like putting "bad" and "worse" on a scaling and being forced to pick one of the two.

[Donut417]

3 hours ago, RejZoR said:

US's interest in national security is so F up they couldn't find their own ass. Like how they sacked Kaspersky for discovering NSA's contractors handling hack tools. But US can't punish their own so the blamed Kaspersky. And everyone believed that crap.

The one thing you have to understand about our government is this, it’s not one cohesive entity. Each part of it has its own agenda. Some parts have a bit more authority than others. 

[Velcade]

3rd stimulus check is a RTX 3090! Come on Joey baby!

[StDragon]

5 minutes ago, Velcade said:

3rd stimulus check is a RTX 3090! Come on Joey baby!

THIS!. There's a lot of people that don't need the checks, but will spend on items to the point of paying scalpers.

 

The more checks are printed, the higher the prices these GPUs will go for.

[whm1974]

32 minutes ago, StDragon said:

THIS!. There's a lot of people that don't need the checks, but will spend on items to the point of paying scalpers.

 

The more checks are printed, the higher the prices these GPUs will go for.

Personally I will get what I need first before spending money on Luxuries. I also shy away from buying overpriced products anyway.

 

But I have long thought that it is Common Sense for Nations to require by Law a large enough Farming/Manufacturing base not to be utterly dependent on other Nations for important Items.