Stacking up the woe - [manufacturing USA]

The continent's economy is in crisis but its manufacturing base was in decline long before the credit crunch. The article surveys America's blighted industrial landscape. American homeowners and financiers are feeling the brum of the global credit crunch, and some would say deservedly so. But well before the first signs of the sub-prime mortgage-fuelled crisis started to emerge in August 2007, it was already clear that the US was going through an industrial crisis of unprecedented proportions. The succession of massively negative trade balances, quarter after quarter, ended up contributing to the loss of over 3.6 million US manufacturing jobs since 2000, with tens of thousands of factories forced to shut down in the process. If anything, the current gloomy economic climate has served only to compound the sense of distress for the vast majority of sectors involved in American manufacturing. The recent surge in the price of key production commodities such as oil and steel, as well as falling domestic consumer demand, is forcing companies to adopt all sorts of downsizing, cost cutting and restructuring measures as they try to weather the storm.