Tim Martin

The U.S.

is not threatening to invade North Korea.

In fact, President Trump has often spoken of his close relationship with Kim Jong-un.

And Moscow and Beijing have given all types of political, economic, and military protection to Pyongyang.

I think that's what that's what world events show.

Iran on the precipice of a nuclear program has made it a target by the Trump administration.

We can look at Venezuela, Cuba, other countries that have nothing amounting to a nuclear program.

but have also made them vulnerable to intimidation and tactics.

There are certainly international agencies that still raise alarm about North Korea's nuclear advances.

In fact, Rafael Grossi, the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency chief, recently said, all this activity points to a very serious increase in their capabilities.

But what's the ability to stop, thwart, convince North Korea not to go down this nuclear pathway?

That has more or less been eliminated.

The main historical mechanism to do this would have been at the United Nations.

However, Russia and China have veto powers to any type of deepening or tightening of sanctions.

That was our Korea Bureau Chief, Tim Martin.

So we've seen PC makers like Dell raise prices for some commercial laptops by as much as 30%.

Acer, for some of their budget computers, have reduced the amount of memory that come in certain models.

And with Xiaomi, a Chinese smartphone company, they got rid of the lower memory option for certain lines of phones.

So you can only get the higher memory options which allow them to protect their margins.

Some of the biggest names in tech, your Apples, your Samsungs, your Nintendos, they have ability to buy in advance in bulk before some of these price hikes really take off, but those stockpiles only last so long.