Eyck Freymann

And if you take away the supply of chips, they fall to earth.

$600 billion, is that the number that the hyperscalers are spending on data centers this year?

You take that away and the US economy is in recession.

So imagine the context of a terrifying stock market correction and heading into recession.

Let's assume that China has taken some actions that reveal that we really need to expand this de-risking or partial decoupling thing.

But we've also learned that we can't decouple from China all at once because we tried this on Liberation Day and we got cold feet within a week because the bond market blew up and all the captains of industry called up the president and said, you have to reverse this, Mr. President, or we're cooked.

So if you can't decouple from China all at once and quickly, the only way to do it is gradually looking at the critical stuff first and the non-critical stuff later, if ever.

So what I want to do is say, what is the most critical things if you have to stack rank our dependencies?

What's 99th percentile?

What's 90th?

What's 70th?

What's 50th?

And then let's go down the list one at a time and figure out how do we break these dependencies.

So in the event of a crisis,

invasion of taiwan or a blockade of taiwan or some gray zone ambiguous thing if we decide we need to reset this relationship and we need to decouple from china five percent ten percent thirty percent what does that actually entail and i would submit that that's a much harder problem than we've realized because even if we want to decouple just a little bit we face a transshipment problem

Right now, as we've discovered, you have a tariff differential on China.

The tariff on China is here.

The tariff on Vietnam, Mexico, everyone else is here.

So companies will export their stuff from China to Vietnam or Mexico.

They'll write made in Vietnam or Mexico on it, and they'll resend it to us.