David Smick has a Washington Post op-ed today that is well worth your time. Here's a taste:
The United States may be undergoing a subtle economic shift. World governments should listen carefully to President Obama, a leader with an uncanny ability to make activist, even radical, proposals sound benign. At the Group of 20 summit in London, for instance, Obama said that the United States cannot be the world's consumer. On the surface, this sounds like a statement about the temporary condition of the business cycle. Actually, Obama was talking about something far more significant -- not outright Smoot-Hawley-style protectionism but a coming policy of small tax, spending and regulatory changes that will encourage this quiet trend toward deglobalization. Like it or not, this shift reflects a growing Washington mind-set that globalization has gone too far. Witness the Buy American provisions on Capitol Hill. Obama is playing not only to his union supporters but also to a segment of the U.S. corporate community whose enthusiasm for the global supply chain and "just-in-time" inventory management is waning. And the coming rise in shipping costs has the potential to turbocharge this deglobalization process. The U.N. agreement last October on sulfur-burning levels for ships (not to mention California's own restrictions on ship emissions) are expected to send shipping costs skyrocketing. A decade from now, it may be profitable to send by sea only items with relatively high value to weight, such as laptops. Analyst Philip Verleger argues that the net result could well be that a lot of low-wage jobs that moved to China, India and other emerging markets will move back to the West. This is already happening in the furniture industry.
That Barcalounger you're sitting on may be the shape of things to come.