Just in the past week, First Solar (FSLR) announced an expansion of its Ohio plant that makes thin-film solar panels. German company Flabeg will break ground on a factory outside Pittsburgh that will manufacture parabolic solar mirrors for large-scale solar power plants planned for the Southwest. Thin-film solar company Energy Conversion Devices (ENER), meanwhile, operates three factories in Michigan and is currently doubling the production capacity of one of its plants.
In fact, nearly all the United States’ current solar manufacturing capacity is in the Midwest, save for Silicon Valley company Ausra’s factory in Las Vegas. (Thin-film startup Nanosolar is building a factory in San Jose, Calif.)
“Our processes really require high productivity, so what makes it competitive here in the Midwest is that we have a great labor force that is eager to work and well-trained already,” ECD chief executive Mark Morelli told Green Wombat on Monday.
This is a just a small example of something I've written about several times - that eventually, globalization comes back to the US. We are simply in phase one and phase two will see many more opportunities for US workers to sell their expertise in services and products to all over the world rather than just to the US.All of it went to people earning more than $75,000Average Wage:
$260 Billion of that total went to those making over $1 million
“One of the things that highly compensated people do is they spend money,” Mr. Bleiwas said. “So when Wall Street suffers, the pain ripples through the rest of the economy.”
“The top market is fine. Upper-end people can still afford their Rolexes,” Mr. Kopel said. The marked drop-off has come in sales of items priced between $500 and $2,500, which he described as midrange.
As members of this committee are well aware, many of America’s working families have far too little to show for an economic period characterized by impressive productivity growth. The 2000s may well be the first business cycle on record where real median family income is lower at the end of the cycle than it was at the beginning. Now, as the 2000s cycle appears to be over, weakness in key markets—housing, labor, financial—is taking a further toll on these already stressed families. Prices of key items, such as energy and food, are rising much more quickly than average inflation, and more to the point, much faster than their earnings. These weaknesses are also leading to the net loss of jobs, and payrolls are down by over 400,000 so far this year.
Higher gasoline
prices squeeze the production side of the economy from both the demand and
costs directions. Consumers’ demand for output drops as they divert
expenditures from other items to gasoline. In addition, gasoline is a factor of
production in the distribution of goods and services. Faced with higher costs,
producers raise their prices. But the lower demand prevents the prices from
rising enough to completely offset cost increases. This leads to production
cuts and, therefore, to lower employment. In turn, these conditions put
downward pressure on wages and salaries.
Since 2000 the prices of steel, oil, and copper quadrupled