Instead, the offshore-destinations kept offering more and more services in the value-chain, until the entire skillset to actually create the low-skill labor processes to offshore was replaced with "let the offshore company manage".
See a list of leading US companies that are off of being king of the hill - Boeing, GE, Intel, ... leading industrial US companies continually divested from manufacturing, or shorted long term investment, not because it wasn't profitable, but because it wasn't profitable enough in the moment. It took decades, and many dividends and stock growth was taken in the middle, but the shortfall manifests in time.
Uber still hasn't managed to make a net profit over its lifetime as a company, by the way.
I agree with the rest of your comment, though. The US public markets reward creative accounting and mortgaging the future for quarterly gains. GE and Jack Welch are a great historical example.
I also think a significant influence on the Fed was a financialized business community demanding 0% interest.
>Many US business elected to chase short term growth, and short term and higher margins and minimize long term investments.
I would like to add that this was due to the influence of Milton Friedman. He put the emphasis on shareholder returns being the most important, without considering the survival of the company itself.
Yes, more evolved financial markets provided easier access capital, but, as it so happens in those types of situations, access to capital and enjoyment of said (liquid/financial) capital became a target in itself, the rest of society didn't matter. In fact, the whole (Western) society was moulded around (liquid/financial) capital, it became its raison d'être.
