iStuffed 0
Asia Times reports on Apple’s off-shoring.
After addressing the notion that there are two economies, a “financial” economy (companies such as Goldman Sachs, which make money by playing with money) and a “real” economy (companies that make money by making stuff), they look at Apple and other tech companies:
A nugget:
Long before the banking collapse of 2008, such important US industries as machine tools, consumer electronics, auto parts, appliances, furniture, telecommunications equipment, and many others that had once dominated the global marketplace suffered their own economic collapse. Manufacturing employment dropped to 11.7 million in October 2009, a loss of 5.5 million or 32% of all manufacturing jobs since October 2000. The last time fewer than 12 million people worked in the manufacturing sector was in 1941. In October 2009, more people were officially unemployed (15.7 million) than were working in manufacturing.
This decimation of the manufacturing sector, which involved the elimination a massive number of well-paying manufacturing jobs, played a central role in the stagnation of income, wages, and purchasing power in the United States. In the three decades prior to the crash of 2008, Robert Reich notes, the wages of the typical American hardly increased, and actually dropped in the 2000s.
One result is that the number of persons who can afford the stuff that the “real” economy produces is decreasing apace.
Follow the link for the rest.
