Nine Economies Pledge $6 Trillion for U.S. Plants: A 'Reverse Marshall Plan'

Nine economies have committed roughly $6 trillion in U.S. investment, and the Peterson Institute's Marcus Noland calls the price tag a "reverse Marshall Plan" — except this time the partners pay to rebuild American manufacturing, not the other way round.

Noland, deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), delivered the assessment on the 27th at a conference co-hosted by the Federation of Korean Industries (FKI) and PIIE at FKI Tower in Seoul's Yeongdeungpo District. The Trump administration secured the commitments by using tariff negotiations as leverage with major trading partners. The Marshall Plan, by contrast, saw Washington fund Western Europe's reconstruction after World War II. The direction of the money has flipped.

The burden goes beyond the headline sums. "Countries that send such large sums abroad bear not only the cost of the investment but also the additional burden of declining real incomes as their currencies lose value," Noland said.

What does this change for the exporting economies?

Noland's modelling points to a modest growth hit for South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, while U.S. growth gets a slight lift. There's a twist, though: a stronger dollar would widen, not narrow, the American trade deficit.

Korea comes off relatively lightly, in his view, because its investment runs over ten years. Japan's schedule is compressed into four. A longer runway spreads the currency pressure and the real-income squeeze.

Former Bank of Korea governor Rhee Chang-yong, now a visiting fellow at PIIE, framed the deals as political as much as economic. Even a Democratic win in Washington would not change much, he argued. "It is a safe assumption that commitments of this scale will continue," he said.

Did tariffs decouple the U.S. from China? No.

PIIE Senior Fellow Mary Lovely delivered the second finding: "U.S. tariff barriers have failed to bring about U.S.-China decoupling." The direct share of U.S. imports from China has fallen, sure. But value added from Chinese goods entering through "connector countries" — she named Mexico and Vietnam — has risen. The supply chain rerouted rather than ruptured.

Trade in AI-related goods keeps growing despite export restrictions. Lovely's advice to Seoul: diversify trade rather than assume the tariff wall does the filtering.

Rhee flagged a sharper domestic risk: the semiconductor cycle. "The risk is that we are so heavily concentrated in semiconductors that we could enter a correction," he said. If AI industry profitability slips, capital markets could correct harder than the underlying economy.

U.S.-China tension, though, cuts both ways for Korea. American export controls on advanced chip equipment to China, Rhee noted, help preserve Korea's technology lead over China. Still, he drew the wider line plainly: "South Korea has benefited greatly from the global trading system. We must continue to uphold multilateralism and free trade."

He also pushed back on fears of one-way capital flight. Even with high global interest rates, semiconductor exports keep pulling substantial capital into Korea, so outflows should not run单向 — the flows net out.

Jobs, AI and what Korean industry wants from the deals

World Bank President Ajay Banga, delivering a keynote by video, warned that new job creation falls far short of the growth in the youth population. "There is still little empirical evidence that AI is reducing jobs," he said, urging economies to deploy AI to lift labour productivity and working conditions instead. His pitch to emerging markets: skip the large-model race and build "small AI" applications in agriculture, education and healthcare.

FKI Executive Vice Chairman Kim Chang-beom closed with the commercial ask: "We need to secure tangible results so that investment in the U.S. leads to exports of Korean-made equipment and materials." The $6 trillion in commitments, in other words, only pays off for Korea if the plant-building pulls Korean machinery and inputs with it — and with the deals now structurally bipartisan, exporters should plan on the U.S. capital spending cycle running for a decade, not a news cycle.