10 years ago U.S. corporations had $2T in cash on their balance sheets — $1.2T in the U.S. and $800B outside; today corporations have about $3T in cash, of which $800B are in the U.S. and nearly $2.2T outside (which they cannot bring home, lest they be taxed another 45% tax on it, so they keep reinvesting it there, providing jobs, and building plants and other infrastructure.)
Tariffs, VATs and higher taxes are not going to fix this, more likely just exacerbate the exodus of capital from the U.S. and diminishing the capital formation in the U.S.
"Capital will always go where it's welcome, and stay where it's well treated" - Walter Wriston
"The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen" - Dennis Prager
"Big government is not the solution to our problems. Big government is the problem" - Ronald Reagan
"One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results" - Milton Friedman
Makerbot was/is a cool company. I got into the 3D space, investing in the three big ones early on and sold somewhat after SYSS acquired Makerbot, i.e., before the bottom fell out. MB was a rebel, much like the Apple crowd, a bunch of libs who went against the grain. Hypocritical of them to be so involved in Chinese mfg.
Anyway, 3D printing, for me was a lot of fun to watch unfold. One of my best investments of all. I don’t own any of them now. It is moving into commoditization time. Once some get into the very high temp metal liquid printing (I think SSYS did/does some of this), then a winner in this space will occur. Imagine nozzles which can take incredibly high temp metal liquid (that is redundant) and cure it so fast it won’t oxidize...likely need nitrogen screening...very cool indeed. Oh well, enough for now.