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JAPAN WANTS TO BUILD THE MACHINES BEHIND THE AI MACHINE

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Artificial Intelligence • Japan • Semiconductors • Geopolitics JAPAN WANTS TO BUILD THE MACHINES BEHIND THE AI MACHINE The semiconductor equipment, robotics, materials and industrial systems that could make Japan indispensable to the next technological order The world keeps describing the AI race as a competition between companies. Nvidia builds the accelerators. Microsoft and Google build the clouds. OpenAI and its rivals build the models. Investors watch the next generation of chips, the next model benchmark and the next giant data-centre announcement. It is a compelling story. It is also incomplete. The more consequential contest is happening underneath it. Every AI system ultimately depends on an extraordinary physical chain: semiconductor manufacturing equipment, silicon wafers, specialty chemicals, precision machinery, sensors, power electronics, cooling systems, advanced packaging, robotics and the indust...
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THE JAPAN TRADE IS COMING HOME: Why the return of Japanese capital could become one of the biggest global market stories of the decade

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Global Finance • Japan • Capital Flows THE JAPAN TRADE IS COMING HOME Why the return of Japanese capital could become one of the biggest global market stories of the decade For decades, one of the world's most consequential financial trades was hiding in plain sight. Japan saved at home and invested abroad. When Japanese interest rates were close to zero, the arithmetic was brutally simple: if domestic assets paid almost nothing, capital had to travel. Japanese banks, insurers, pension funds and investors became enormous buyers of foreign bonds and assets. The yen became one of the world's great funding currencies. The rest of the world got used to Japanese money being somewhere else. That assumption is now being challenged. Japan's 10-year government bond yield recently approached 3% , reaching 2.945% on August 18, its highest level since 1996. The move is not simply another Japanese bond-market sto...
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WHY JAPAN'S NEW INVESTOR IS DIFFERENT

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Global Finance • Japan • Markets WHY JAPAN'S NEW INVESTOR IS DIFFERENT NISA, household wealth and the quiet revolution that could reshape global capital flows For decades, Japan's most important investor was often described by what it did not do. It saved. It deposited. It accumulated cash. It accepted low returns in exchange for familiarity and safety. The country's enormous household balance sheet became one of the world's great reservoirs of dormant financial capital. Now Japan is trying to change that behaviour, and the significance is much larger than the success of a tax-advantaged investment account. NISA is becoming part of a national attempt to move household savings towards productive investment, while Japan's financial authorities openly describe the objective as creating a virtuous cycle in which household money reaches companies and markets more efficiently. NISA itself is not th...
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WHEN THE STATE SOLD CHILDREN: Switzerland's forgotten child-labour system—and what it reveals about labour exploitation in the age of AI

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WHEN THE STATE SOLD CHILDREN Switzerland's forgotten child-labour system—and what it reveals about labour exploitation in the age of AI There are some historical photographs that become more disturbing the longer you look at them. Not because they show violence, but because nothing in them appears immediately violent. People are standing. People are working. Adults are going about their business. Institutions are functioning. The world looks orderly. And then you realise what the photograph does not show: the powerlessness of the child. The child has no voice, no bargaining power and, often, no meaningful way to refuse the arrangement into which adults have placed them. In Switzerland, a country now associated with prosperity, precision, stability and one of the world's highest standards of living, vulnerable children were once turned into a source of labour. They became known as Verdingkinder , or “contract children”. ...
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