If trade with China stopped today, how quickly can the United States re-tool up to supply the enormous demand for PCBs, basic electronic components like SMD resistors and capacitors, microcontrollers, transformers, chokes, cables, wifi chips, antennas, power transistors, PLAs, LCD displays, OLED displays, solar modules, and the myriad other goods on which our modern society increasingly relies?
"Sneakers" is a cute little jab, but A GDP predicated on the consumption of televised football and mocha lattes is qualitatively different from one predicated on the production of goods upon which reliance the profligate NFL viewers are blissfully unaware.
At some point, even if that point is measured in centuries, the producers and savers eventually win over the gluttonous consumers. China is playing a long game with a long-term vision, securing rights over natural resources around the world, acquiring critical control over global supply chains, and artificially pegging the Yuan down to fool us into thinking that the value of passively watching Netflix is (as measured by GDP) greater than that of the construction of ever-faster pick-and-place machines.
Meanwhile, we look only to the next quarter and goose our EPS with low-interest stock buybacks, and realistically believe that mindless consumption of pixels is a more solid foundation for an economy than producing the "picks and shovels" used to deliver those pixels.