Foreign Policy

“No one wants to be the idiot that relocates all the factories today and then finds out tomorrow that the trade war is over,” William Zarit, the chamber’s chairman told me. “But the longer it goes on, the smarter that decision appears. I expect we’ll see increases in the numbers of people thinking about relocation [in our next survey], but, again, I don’t expect many will be relocating back to the U.S.” In fact, the only story I heard about a company shifting operations in response to the trade war was when I spoke with a German textile machinery manufacturer, who told me over drinks that his family-run company had closed one factory—in the United States.