Roben Farzad:
Well, there’s a false nostalgia.
I think Donald Trump, you saw in his press conference, he says there’s an easy answer to this. Build it kind of soup-to-nuts here. Integrate across the board. Don’t just be sending it back and forth the border, Mexico, Canada, whether it’s textiles or autos.
I will say there’s tremendous slack in the system. You could always turn to a Bangladesh, a Cambodia, El Salvador. There are other markets that are very willing to take the raw materials and turn them around back to us. But if you look at the likes of Walmart and Target and Gap and the various apparel manufacturers, towel makers, they have longstanding relationships that took 20-plus years to source after NAFTA, that they’re suddenly going to have to scramble and say, wow, I can’t get this done.
And it’s brutal. I mean, Walmart is going to say, well, if you can’t get it done, who can? And this is where it becomes self-defeating for us. It ends up hurting our farmers, hurting the ones that churn out the cotton, the hemp, the various other raw materials that go into these textile products, for example.
