The U.S. Treasury's Poor Excuse for a Website... and the Taiwan Risk Beyond Chips

I laughed out loud when I saw that the government's TreasuryDirect site had been crashing under the weight of a last-minute rush by investors to buy I bonds... Today is the last day for investors to sign up to get 9.62%, before rates fall to an expected 6.47% for the next six months – still […] Not rendering correctly? View this e-mail as a web page [here](. [Empire Financial Daily] The U.S. Treasury's Poor Excuse for a Website... and the Taiwan Risk Beyond Chips By Herb Greenberg --------------------------------------------------------------- [Bill O'Reilly reports on 'the next great medical breakthrough of the decade']( The Gates Foundation, Fidelity, and Elon Musk are going all in on a new development that Inc. magazine says "will change health care forever." [Click here for more on O'Reilly's special report on "the next great medical breakthrough."]( --------------------------------------------------------------- I laughed out loud when I saw that the government's TreasuryDirect site had been crashing under the weight of a last-minute rush by investors to buy I bonds... Today is the last day for investors to sign up to get 9.62%, before rates fall to an expected 6.47% for the next six months – still a good rate, but not the bonanza (relatively speaking) they had been. But to get those high rates, there's a catch... No, not the $10,000 per person per year cap, or the amount of interest you lose if you cash them in during the first five years... The catch is you have to use the TreasuryDirect website, which, as one financial planner [told]( the Wall Street Journal, "isn't known for its user friendliness." Give that man the Understatement of the Year Award. My wife and I signed up a few weeks ago. And we found that for signing up and signing in, the website is like a throwback to the days of dialup. It's exactly what you might expect from a clunky, bureaucratic government website... only worse. The system for inputting your username and password is as if it was designed by and for software engineers back when the Internet was still referred to as the World Wide Web. It's so bad that it's almost like the U.S. government is trying to do everything possible to convince you not to lend it your money. The good news is that it's so obtuse that nobody would ever hack your account, because it's simply not worth the time... It would be like trying to break into a house with 15 different combination-style padlocks. Even better news: As bad as it is, it works... and we got our bonds. (Earlier this year, my colleague Whitney Tilson was also able to navigate the site successfully – he shared the details of how to buy I bonds in his [June 17 daily e-mail]( That doesn't excuse the government of the most technologically advanced country in the world, which invented the Internet, to have such a joke of a website. Or maybe it's that rates were so low for so long that nobody ever went to the website, so there was no reason to update it. Whatever the reason, here's a memo to the Treasury Department: Time for more than a reboot, and welcome to the 21st century. --------------------------------------------------------------- Recommended Link: [MAJOR BUY ALERT: EVs/Wall Street/Gains]( Enrique Abeyta spent 25 years on Wall Street, where he managed several billion-dollar hedge funds. The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Barron’s, Institutional Investor, Forbes, Business Insider, and Bloomberg all have his number on speed-dial. But once they get a load of what he's discovered, his phone will be ringing off the hook! If you buy just one stock in 2022... [it should be this one](. --------------------------------------------------------------- Moving on, in Empire Financial Research's predictions for this year, I had predicted that the markets would get walloped by a surprise out of left field... I was right but wrong. I thought it would be a clash between China and Taiwan, not Russia and Ukraine. Still, due to post-pandemic supply-chain issues and the impact on Taiwan-made semiconductor chips, especially on cars, we already have a sneak peek into what a broader disruption might look like. But it's not just chips... One of the holdings in my Investment Opportunities portfolio is LKQ (LKQ), which in the U.S. supplies junk and aftermarket parts for cars that have been in crashes... All of the company's aftermarket parts are made in Taiwan, which is why I cited Taiwan and geopolitical uncertainties as a risk to the idea. (If you're a subscriber, you can read the full writeup on LKQ [right here](... If not, find out how to gain instant access to it – and the full Investment Opportunities portfolio of open recommendations – by [clicking here]( It's one thing to know the risk... but it's another to fully understand just how dire the true risk is far beyond just LKQ – especially the way CEO Nick Zarcone put it on LKQ's third-quarter earnings call yesterday, when he said (emphasis added)... As you know, and as everyone knows, the entire aftermarket collision parts industry moved to Taiwan decades ago. There [is] no material production capacity outside of Taiwan. It just doesn't exist. There are no plants sitting in Mexico or Vietnam or India sitting idle waiting for the Taiwanese machine to get shut down, right? It doesn't exist... And the reality is if they were to shut down the economy and shut down [those] kind of shipments out of Taiwan, auto parts is the least of everyone's concern. Sixty-five percent of all semiconductor production and 90% of all advanced chip production comes out of Taiwan. So if China were to embargo export shipments, you would not be able to buy iPhones or new cars or medical equipment or anything that has a chip in it. And we think that the Chinese leadership is – they're very smart. They certainly don't want to cook the golden goose that Taiwan represents in the form of a really strong economy. Our sense, and in talking with outside advisers, is it'd be more likely that China would move kind of to a Hong Kong model first, where they would seek to have significant influence over the territory, but not just shut – totally just shut down their economy. I hope he's right. Then again, people never thought Russia would do what it did to Ukraine, including the Ukrainians, just before the invasion. Re-shoring, anyone? As always, feel free to reach out via e-mail by [clicking here](mailto:feedback@empirefinancialresearch.com?subject=Feedback%20for%20Herb). I look forward to hearing from you. Regards, Herb Greenberg October 28, 2022 [Get a 60-day, 100% money-back trial to Empire Real Wealth by clicking here.]( --------------------------------------------------------------- If someone forwarded you this e-mail and you would like to be added to the Empire Financial Daily e-mail list to receive e-mails like this every weekday, simply [sign up here](. © 2022 Empire Financial Research. All rights reserved. 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