A company such as 3M, the American manufacturing powerhouse, seemed until recently a beacon of globalisation. It sells the Post-it note and other famous products all over the world. Indeed 60 per cent of its $30bn revenues, and 40 per cent of its workforce, sit outside American shores.

But here is a curious thing: if you ask Inge Thulin, the Swedish-born chief executive of 3M, to describe corporate strategy these days, he does not speak of globalisation. Instead, he prefers to talk about “localisation” — and the benefits of operating in the mighty US of A.

“We employ 20,000 people in manufacturing in America and we have expanded this by 10 per cent in the last five years,” he told me last month at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “Our strategy has changed. If you go back [several] years, there was a strategy of producing at huge facilities at certain places around the world, and shipping it to other countries. But now we have a strategy of localisation and regionalisation. We think you should invest in your domestic market as much as you can.”