After Decades of Outsourcing, Manufacturing Jobs Coming Home to US
Monday, 7 May 2012
One third of all U.S. manufacturing executives of companies with sales above $1 billion per year now say they are planning or considering “reshoring”
____ Most economists — even those inclined to sympathize with the Obama administration’s economic policies — scoffed in 2010 when, in his State of the Union address, the president vowed to double US exports in five years — creating 2 million jobs in the process.
It’s not that this wasn’t possible in the eyes of economists. It just wasn’t likely, they thought, that the global conditions and political climate in the United States would allow it.
The “zero effect” — the distorting phenomenon of measuring growth starting at an unnaturally low point — kept a damper on enthusiasm even as export figures soared in 2010-2011.
Many experts assumed that the favorable trends supporting that growth had little to do with long-term shifts. Instead, most felt the numbers reflected a coincidental confluence of events: sky-high oil prices that drove the costs of shipping upwards, a mega-recession that undermined American labor’s negotiating leverage, Federal Reserve “quantitative easing” that kept the dollar cheap and pumped up US exports, and freak events like the euro zone meltdown and the Japanese earthquake/tsunami that took major players off the economic chessboard.
But the data has started to cause reassessments. Monthly net exports have grown from $140 billion to $180 billion since the start of 2010.
read more: http://www.cnbc.com/id/47323840/
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