Cricket: Bingo! Your mention of “insourcing” was exactly what I was talking about regarding soaring labor and material costs in China and India.
China is also experiencing a crucial and critical shortage of qualified middle and senior management personnel and this is having a major impact on the bottom line in that they either have pay exorbitant rates to acquire outside talent or pay the price of using local talent, but then suffering bottom line losses due to inexperience, incompetence, corruption and idiocy. I’m not using the last term lightly, either. We’ve seen quite a few examples of Chinese “quality control” in pet food, children’s toys, milk and dairy products, etc.
At some point, it becomes cheaper for the US to self produce various products and we have the infrastructure to do so, we just need to upgrade it and improve it. One good example is American steel production, which ranks as some of the most efficient in the world. We have the capability, we just need to put the money and political capital behind it to get it going.
I work in high tech composites and I will tell you that Yankee Ingenuity is alive and well. I also use Japanese made products as well, and these are also uniformly excellent. The real interesting part is that American companies keep a careful eye on their European and Japanese competitors and immediately begin engineering the next iteration as the competition improves.
I don’t think it will take much for “Made in the USA” to mean something again. Call me naive, or simple, or nationalistic, but I believe it.
