Globalization 2.0 / reshoring (new) Evolution, not retreat ▲

Robotti (RWH046, 2024-JUN-22; SumZero, 2025-JUL-24): "de-globalization" is a misread — it's the evolution of globalization, which moves "south and west" (Japan → Korea → China → Vietnam/Bangladesh, next India + Southeast Asia, ~2bn people climbing the income ladder) and drives a huge build-out of infrastructure and energy demand. The other leg is North America's structural energy-cost advantage: cheap, non-exportable natural gas pulls energy-intensive industry onshore (European more than Asian), making US industrials competitively advantaged for the first time in 50 years — though a growing debt load is the offsetting cloud. Emerging markets (the resource-rich "South") also win as they capture more of the value of the materials the North must buy. Uzo (Jun 22): a concrete reshoring leg in critical-commodity supply chains — a US push to onshore commodity-linked supply (e.g. domestic lithium pulled from oilfield brine, his LibertyStream thesis) that he sees as a multi-year trend likely to persist "regardless of the outcome of this conflict" or how supply chains look in six months. Hay (Haymaker POW!, 2026-JUN-26): frames reshoring as one leg of a three-cycle regime (debt-supercycle unwind · globalization reversal/reshoring · energy constraint) that is a structural tailwind for real-economy demand — the ~$1.6T of reshoring investment announced since 2020 plus energy-security spend drive commercial & specialty-insurance demand, while higher-for-longer rates lift insurer float income (the explicit basis for his Travelers (TRV) Buy). Currie (Jul 17): the "HALO trade" — Hard Assets, Local Operations (rebuild supply chains, energy security, defense); Ukraine 2022 → Hormuz → the next Iran/Russia round are "the deglobalization theme in process, which just leads to higher commodity prices" — the "revenge of the old economy" rotation into asset-heavy industries starved of capital by asset-light tech. Singh (Jul 26): the tariff regime rolled over — the Section 122 10% global stopgap hit its 150-day statutory limit and expired Jul 24; USTR replaced it under Section 301, justified on forced-labor grounds across ~60 partners: a 10% tier (UK, EU, Canada, Mexico, India, Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka) and a 12.5% tier (China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Brazil, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Philippines, South Africa, Thailand, UAE). Exempt: agricultural food, fertilizers, oil/gas and goods not made domestically; steel/aluminum/autos excluded as already covered; for China the new duties are additive. ("The legal justification cites forced-labor prohibitions, which is unreal — most of these countries do not have forced labor at all.") 2026-AUG-03 (Nomi Prins / Prinsights): the reshoring push now runs through procurement law and scrap, not just tariffs. Aluminum is caught by both July directives without being named in either — EO 14415 forces contractors to trace every material back to its smelter and qualify a domestic or strategically aligned source for anything China-linked, while the Jul 30 determination lets Commerce block exports of aluminum scrap and spent material "so a country down to four operating smelters recycles what it has instead of shipping it abroad." China makes ~60% of world primary aluminum; the Section 232 tariff was doubled to 50% (Jun 2025) and a Jul 2026 incentive cuts the tariff for firms investing in domestic smelting. A DOE-backed 500,000-ton plant — the first new U.S. smelter in some 45 years — is in development; the Energy Secretary's stated goal is "revitalizing this country's manufacturing base and reducing our reliance on foreign suppliers." Prins reads the eighteen-month campaign as running on "U.S. government equity stakes, permit acceleration, trade controls," with the money aimed at "the processors, refiners, and alternative suppliers" — the midstream, not the mine. 2026-AUG-05 (Pomboy): Deglobalization begets the reverse of 1980–2020: a multipolar world less reliant on the dollar and USTs (China and Japan buying less or selling) plus inflationary reshoring — rates grinding higher year after year for decades, the mirror image of the post-Berlin-Wall disinflation. 2026-AUG-17 — Jay Singh (David Lin Report): sovereign supply chains — "governments subsidizing domestic production in critical sectors like rare earths, energy storage, semiconductors." 2026-AUG-26: Prins: the US-Canada aluminum/steel deal (50%→~25%) collapsed; 50% took effect Saturday, the US threatened auto tariffs by Monday, and Canada announced up to 50% on nearly 700 US products from September 8 — while Canada supplies 56% of US aluminum imports, so the leverage runs opposite to the tariff. (Nomi Prins, Prinsights 2026-AUG-26) 2026-AUG-27: Every: the correct label is economic statecraft (“every instrument of state together towards an economic goal”), aiming at neo-mercantilism; the target state is Hamiltonian — government “incentivizes, encourages, cajoles and threatens the private sector into doing things that increase US power rather than quarterly returns.” Both branches reshore: if stablecoins work the US buys cheaply and re-industrializes; if Europe opts out, “no one's selling to it… ergo the US will have to re-industrialize.” (Michael Every, Thoughtful Money 2026-AUG-27) 2026-AUG-22: TIP: CATL is walled out of the US (Pentagon list) and its workaround is LRS — Ford owns the Michigan plant, CATL licenses chemistry for a ~3-4% royalty; the bear read is “defensive capitulation… a ghost in the machine vulnerable to a stroke of the pen,” plus LRS leakage — training the competitors trying to exclude it. (The Investor's Podcast, Bull vs. Bear 2026-AUG-22) 2026-AUG-24: Doomberg: the US should aim to be a highly competitive multipolar power, not the unipolar one — most oil and natgas production, 90 operating reactors, huge coal reserves, and “a Western Hemisphere to itself” (Brazil the wild card). (Doomberg, Risk Takers 2026-AUG-24) 2026-AUG-23 — Jay Singh (SSR call, 2026-AUG-23): US-Canada trade talks collapsed and Trump invoked Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 — a Depression-era statute — for 50% tariffs on ~$20B (C$28B) of dairy, liquor, autos, plywood, electrical equipment and hockey gear, with no USMCA carve-outs; Carney suspended negotiations and will retaliate dollar-for-dollar from September 8. Singh's objection is sequencing: "this tariff war should have been paused until the Iran war was resolved," and "right after the November midterm elections, you better believe we're going to have even more trade wars." Corporate response: Google moving all Pixel phone, watch and earbud production out of China to Vietnam and India from 2027. 2026-JUL-27 — Curtis Moore, Energy Fuels (Natural Resource Stocks, 2026-JUL-27): reshoring framed as diversification, not displacement — "we're not going to dominate China… China is going to be the dominant producer of rare earths and rare earth magnets for a long, long time to come," and he credits it ("China has been smarter than we have been over the last many years"). The demand he is selling into is Western OEMs who "don't want to be dependent on a single source" — autos, factory and humanoid robotics, defense. Note the method as much as the theme: where the barrier is manufacturing know-how rather than capital or permits, the fast route to a domestic chain is buying the few existing ex-China facilities, not building — "trying to develop that internally or organically would be very very difficult. So our approach has been let's go just purchase the market leaders in this very very scarce space" (a South Korean metallization plant from Australian Strategic Materials, close ~end-Aug 2026; Vacuumschmelze and its $600M South Carolina magnet plant, close early 2027 pending government approvals). (Company IR interview — management's own case.) 2026-AUG-30 (Jay Singh, SSR call): the trade war widened on two fronts at once. Canada: Trump "said he would place 50% tariffs on Canadian automobiles, trucks, and automotive parts starting in January" after Carney vowed retaliation and talks collapsed; Canada is raising steel tariffs to 50% from 25% with ~700 products facing new 15/25/50% rates from September 8. "This is the latest escalation in a tit-for-tat trade conflict that could disrupt supply chains and threaten the future of the USMCA. Approval ratings have been falling because of all these tariffs and wars, which are resulting in inflation fear." Semiconductors: the White House is weighing duties "that would extend beyond chips to products like servers, laptops, and gaming consoles," possibly linking tariff-free allowances to US manufacturing commitments — landing the day after Nvidia's print and taking the semi index down 2.3%. And the supply-chain response is already visible in Apple's qualification of Chinese memory (CXMT, YMTC) for China-bound devices, pending a US decision possibly after a September Trump-Xi meeting. Luke Gromen (Goldfinger Capital, 2026-AUG-14) puts a timetable on it and it is long: "hey, we're going to reshore in 5 to 10 years — it's a freaking pipe dream. Maybe 10 to 15 best case. Probably more like 20." The reason is that doing it fast requires the 1940 fiscal arithmetic (25%-of-GDP deficits, a 10× Fed balance sheet, 30–50% inflation, capital controls, a 90% top tax rate), which nobody will accept. AI helps but doesn't relieve the constraint — "give an engineer a bunch of AI, it can happen a lot faster… but oh by the way, China's got AI too, and they may not have quite as good frontier models but they are very far ahead of us in installed base of actual production capacity." His consolation: a 20-year timetable "probably prevents these neocons from leading us into a stupid world war." The historical framing is the Longer Telegram window — "the reason China caught up to us so easily in 20 years was because we were distracted from '02 to 2020 with this nonsense in the Middle East" — and the hangover rule: "you don't get to drink 16 bottles of Jack and then say okay, I'm going to go run a marathon now." 2026-SEP-03 (Murti/Veriten, Trevor Rose ep. 300): "the idea that the US can just outsource everything to China... was not ever a sustainable strategy and we're course correcting maybe imperfectly with a lot of noise and a lot of turmoil - and I don't think we're alone in that." China's manufacturing overcapacity "is a question for every other country in the world including Asian countries, including Canada, including United States, including Western Europe," and the difficulty is that Chinese output is genuinely low cost: "how do you fight Chinese deflationary impulses and motivate reshoring in your own country?" He leaves one question deliberately open - "can the US be the reserve currency in the world if it wants to reshore its manufacturing?" - and folds the whole thing into the volatility side of Super-Vol: "it's not going to be a smooth economic cycle." Three emerging-Asia pitches in the AUG-03 SSR compilation are supply-chain-relocation trades rather than growth trades. Harding Loevner's Hoa Phat is Vietnam's lowest-cost integrated steelmaker at 35%+ share, capacity just expanded ~60% by Dung Quat 2, with newly imposed Vietnamese tariffs on Chinese steel imports supplying the pricing kicker. Baron India runs two off the same grid: INOX India (60% share in cryogenic equipment) is pitched on India "reduc[ing] dependence on Middle East energy imports" plus exports "driven by global supply chain diversification"; Precision Wires (30% share in enamelled copper winding wire) on India's power-capacity upcycle and EV-grade demand. Both modelled at 15-20% compounded growth over three to five years. (fund pitches compiled by SSR, AUG-03) 2026-SEP-10 — the Canadian manager's tariff triage (JF Tardif, Timelo). Tariff announcements are "overall pretty small relative to the GDP" and NAFTA still governs most cross-border trade, with Trump already reversing some measures because "it doesn't work for us anymore. We have a shortage of this." He has changed nothing in the portfolio. The single tripwire: "if NAFTA was at one point like we're going to get rid of NAFTA completely, that would be the time to really worry" — "a disaster for all our Canadian exporters companies" — which he judges unlikely. Also notes that Canada's trade surplus with the US becomes a deficit once oil is excluded. Arjun Murti (2026-SEP-12): reframes sustainability as onshoring — climate policy that shuts in domestic oil, gas, coal, copper, rare earths and refining and ships jobs to China "has been bad for the climate"; wants maximum mining, refining and processing at home and with friends ("especially Canada, Australia"). 2026-SEP-16 (Ben Finegold): supply-chain localization is half of Ocean Wall's nuclear supplier score. The West lags China (reactors for under $6bn; EDF seconding engineers there) on regulation, NIMBYism, subsidies to FID, labor and an engineering-led state (Breakneck). The fix is licensing reform plus government first-loss capital ($300–500m) for UK SMRs.