Everyone wants to make more in America. Almost no one is asking who will buy it.
We have already written about the Make More in America Initiative and the four priorities Chairman Jovanovic has put at the center of the Export-Import Bank of the United States: American Jobs First, American Energy Dominance, Supply Chain Security and Industries of the Future. That piece was about building capacity at home, the long-term financing that lets a United States manufacturer expand a plant or a production line.
This is about the question that comes immediately after it, and gets far less attention.
Who is going to buy what all that new capacity makes?
Capacity is a bet on demand. If you expand your facility and the demand you are betting on sits in the emerging markets of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, then the new capacity is only as valuable as your buyers’ ability to pay for what it produces. And creditworthy buyers in those markets, even strong ones, routinely cannot access the kind of medium-term financing that a purchase of United States capital goods requires. Their local banks will not lend five to seven years for imported equipment, or will only do it at a rate that kills the economics.
So you can build the most efficient new line in your sector, financed beautifully through Make More in America, and still watch the order go to a foreign competitor, because that competitor’s buyer was handed financing and yours was not.
This is why I think of it as a two-sided lever, and why the two sides belong in the same conversation.
On the home side, the Make More in America Initiative and related programs can finance the expansion itself, the domestic investment that lets you meet rising global demand. That is the side getting the attention right now, and rightly so.
On the export side, the U.S. Finance Program does the other half of the job. It gives your overseas customers the ability to buy what that new capacity produces. Backed by an EXIM guarantee, we make direct payment to you, the exporter, at shipment, and your buyer repays over five to seven years. You are not financing the sale off your own balance sheet, and you are not exposed to a customer you cannot watch from three time zones away.
Pull those two sides apart and each one weakens. Build capacity with no plan for buyer financing and you have built a bet on demand you may not be able to convert. Offer buyer financing but stay capacity-constrained and you leave orders on the table you cannot fill. Put them together and you have something closer to a strategy: the ability to make more at home, and the ability to sell it into the markets your competitors find too hard to reach.
The practical change here is not complicated, but it does require a shift in who is in the room when these decisions get made. Financing is usually treated as something the finance team sorts out after the commercial team has won or lost the deal. By then it is too late. The financing structure is part of what wins the deal, so it needs to be in the pitch, not a clean-up exercise afterward.
That is where a white-label finance partner earns its place. Your commercial team can walk into a conversation with an overseas buyer already able to say, in effect, “and here is how you can pay for this over five years.” The buyer hears a complete offer. You keep the relationship, the margin and the balance sheet you would otherwise have put at risk. And the deal that would have died on payment terms closes instead.
The reshoring conversation is going to keep getting louder, and that is good for American manufacturing. But louder is not the same as complete. Making more in America only creates value if someone abroad can afford to buy it. The companies that get the most out of this moment will be the ones that plan both halves at once: the capacity to produce, and the financing that lets the world buy.
Build the capacity. Then make sure your buyers can say yes to it. One without the other is only half a plan.