Here are two interesting nuggets I came across in the past couple of days.

From Bloomberg Businessweek:

Multinationals operating in China have been setting up factories deep in the interior in search of affordable labor. The drawback: These plants can be more than a thousand kilometers (621 miles) from the coast….

The item focuses on China’s railways, but it has other implications: it’s harder to make goods for cheap in China and ship them to other markets.

Then this news:

Consumer electronics titan Apple is planning to move production to some of its products to the United States, but until now the company has kept quiet as to which devices will be made in America.

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A report from the Taiwanese tech publication Digitimes, quoting sources in the upstream supply chain, said Apple is set to move its Mac mini production lines back to the U.S.

And recall this, from October:

Three decades after being devastated by the closing of steel mills, this gritty river valley is hoping its revival will come from cheap natural gas

It’s easy to see why some folks think market forces will bring more manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. in coming years.