Breaking up is hard to do. Breaking up with the world’s manufacturing superpower apparently costs $13.7 trillion.

A new analysis from EY-Parthenon calculated that the United States alone would need to invest $13.7 trillion over the next 25 years to effectively stop relying on China in highly exposed sectors. The total bill for the US, Eurozone, and UK combined comes to $23.6 trillion, a figure that economists involved in the study described as “astronomical” and, in some cases, “completely unrealistic.”

What $13.7 trillion actually looks like

The investment would need to span manufacturing buildouts, infrastructure development, research and development, software capabilities, transportation networks, and workforce training. America would essentially need to rebuild entire industrial ecosystems from scratch in sectors where China currently dominates.

The timeline stretches to 2050, giving policymakers a 25-year runway.

The EY-Parthenon analysis arrives as the Trump administration pushes aggressive tariffs and export controls designed to reduce American dependence on Chinese manufacturing.

The macro shockwave and what it means for markets

For traditional markets, manufacturers and technology firms face significantly higher operational costs if reshoring and friend-shoring become policy mandates rather than suggestions. Companies that built their margins on cheap Chinese manufacturing would need to find those savings elsewhere, or accept thinner profits.

Equity markets face a split outcome. Companies positioned to benefit from reshoring, think domestic manufacturers, construction firms, semiconductor foundries, and workforce training platforms, could see sustained tailwinds over a multi-decade investment cycle. But companies reliant on Chinese supply chains for margin optimization would face a structural headwind.

The crypto angle hiding in plain sight

The EY-Parthenon analysis makes no direct reference to cryptocurrency tokens or protocols. But indirect implications exist across several areas.

Supply chains shifting from China to Vietnam, India, Mexico, and other friend-shoring destinations create corridors that often have less efficient banking infrastructure than the US-China axis. That’s precisely the gap that stablecoin-based payment networks and cross-border crypto rails are designed to fill.

If companies need to raise trillions for infrastructure and manufacturing buildouts, tokenized real-world assets, from equipment financing to infrastructure bonds, could find a natural use case in helping channel capital toward these massive investment needs.

A sustained decoupling effort could also accelerate China’s push to internationalize the yuan through digital currency initiatives, including its digital yuan project. If trade flows bifurcate along geopolitical lines, competing payment and settlement systems become more relevant, not less.

Even the economists who produced the report acknowledge the figures may be unrealistic. If full decoupling is financially impractical, the likely outcome is partial decoupling: selective reshoring in critical sectors like semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and defense technology, while maintaining Chinese dependencies in less strategically sensitive areas.