Nuthin

Once again, with vigour: yet another report 'proving' that real estate, particularly residential, is a non-producing 'asset'. A house ain't anything like an ASML litho machine. And even that real asset can only turn a profit for the owners if it can run 24/7 and can shift all that output.

The company's newest lithography tool weighs a staggering 165 tons and will cost up to $380 million, roughly double the price of its previous low-NA EUV lithography machines.

The capital/labour ratio for such automation has to be sky high. Let's see if we can find some numbers. Well, not specific to ASML, but to high-NA EUVL machines in general

Perhaps surprisingly, operating labor costs are expected to be relatively stable. Leading-edge fabs are extensively automated because that approach is less likely to introduce contaminants or defects in the production process than with human intervention. As a result, staff size and responsibilities — mostly in engineering, technical, and operations functions — won't need to change substantially.

So, at the least, labour cost isn't going to rise with The New Machine (with or without a Soul).

Therefore, we see another case of the Tyranny of Fixed/Average Cost.

China's problem today, is just a worst case scenario of any pyramid scheme: it only works if the Next Buyer has more available cash than the current owner. Housing, as a non-producing asset, can only be profitable to the mortgage holder if incomes of those in the buyers class (a bit different for each profitable price point) continue to rise. Inflation, according to the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts, is always bad; unless and until they go to sell a house! Then it's God's Gift of Capital Gains.