Watching the Rust Belt get hollowed out

When I graduated from university, I found myself in a Rust Belt whose manufacturing was well on its way to being hollowed out by the Wall Street-led offshoring movement. While I was never directly involved in manufacturing myself, growing up in Northeast Ohio in the heart of the Rust Belt meant I was closely connected with friends that had a front row seat for it.

When I was working on my first start up, at some point I connected with the son of a local boat manufacturer who had purchased a stainless steel factory in China. He went on and on about how much better the quality was of the machined hardware for their boats delivered faster and cheaper than local metal shops.

Several years later, after I'd actually relocated to China myself, a friend who worked at a General Motors supplier in Michigan found that his employer had been acquired by the Beijing Municipal Government.

This hollowing out wasn't simply the result of free trade, but policy decisions - trade and monetary - made by a political elite beholden to Wall Street and interested only in maximizing shareholder returns and a government interested in avoiding fiscal funding constraints.