Winners & Losers

The most counterintuitive thing about this whole credit crisis is figuring out who wins and who loses.

It occured to me, as i pondered the growth in exports from a company like cummins, who apparently produces high powered engines for big trucks and whose products are in demand overseas, sitting in Columbus, Ohio using an american labor force. I'm thinking that the investment in that factory and the knowhow to do what they do is probably substantial, the demand for their products integral to the growth of economies around the world, and that they would be one of the winners in this mess.

We've talked a lot about china, and the cheap products that they create for the us market. Those factories, too required substantial investment, organization of their labor force, setting up supply chains, etc. As their economy weakens, the downside of fast growth could be seriously disruptive.

So maybe americans have some hope after all. We've been struggling (and i bet cummins execs are not earning the big salaries of the wall street titans) to build legitimate companies while struggling to attract capital while hot money was dazzled by the short term profits of creating junk and selling it for too much money.

So china has factories that are set up to produce things nobody needs and we have factories built to make complex engines that are mission critical to building infrastructure.

Score one for us.