Moreover the chips were never outsourced. Toyota never made its own chips, nor is it feasible to. You seem to have some sort of idealized view where a company internally manufactures everything it needs starting from raw materials. That’s not how it works, and that’s never how it worked.
Toyota is just a symptom, every other car manufacturer and other industries are facing shortages as well. The US economy is now strangled because our supply chain got outsourced for "efficiency" that didn't account for potential disruptions
Voters would have rewarded politicians who supported these tariffs by voting them out of office for making all their toys more expensive. Everyone likes cheaper stuff and more stuff in the short term.
- shareholders (more profit)
- consumers (lower prices)
Second, you could say shareholders == Wall Street, but you could just as well say that shareholders are pension holders, banks, insurances and small private investors. All of these simply want to have return on their investment that is as high as possible. If that's good or bad is an interesting question, but the bottom line is that very few people are without blame here.
plenty of people have been warning for decades how the reliance on manufacturing from other countries could have major consequences. The fact that a small island like Taiwan is probably the most important geo-political issue in the world could have been prevented with a little bit of long term planning
the worst part is our government is rewarding them for bad behavior, the article mentions the billion dollar chip subsidy program. So these companies made money outsourcing and will now make more by bringing it back. Instead they should put a massive tariff on any chip not made in the US. Companies that invested here would be rewarded for loyalty