China going into a DEPRESSION TOO?

Financially troubled plants are being abandoned by the boss, leaving behind unpaid workers and debts.
By Don Lee
November 3, 2008

Reporting from Shaoxing, China -- First, Tao Shoulong burned his company's financial books. He then sold his private golf club memberships and disposed of his Mercedes S-600 sedan.

And then he was gone.

And just like that, China's biggest textile dye operation -- with four factories, a campus the size of 31 football fields, 4,000 workers and debts of at least $200 million -- was history.

"We're pretty much dead now," said Mao Youming, one of 300 suppliers stiffed last month by Tao's company, Jianglong Group. Lighting a cigarette in a coffee shop here, the 38-year-old spoke calmly about the bleak future of his industrial gas business. Tao owed him $850,000, Mao said, about 60% of his annual revenue. "We cannot pay our workers' salaries. We are about to be bankrupt too."

Government statistics show that 67,000 factories of various sizes were shuttered in China in the first half of the year, said Cao Jianhai, an industrial economics researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. By year's end, he said, more than 100,000 plants will have closed.

As more factories in China shut down, stories of bosses running away have become familiar, multiplying the damage of China's worst manufacturing decline in at least a decade.

Even before the global financial crisis, factory owners in China were straining under soaring labor and raw-material costs, an appreciating Chinese currency and tougher legal, tax and environmental requirements. When the credit crunch took hold -- prompting Western businesses to slash orders for Chinese goods and bankers to curtail loans to factories -- many operations were pushed over the edge.

US Depression is widening!

Steel industry shutting down 17 of 29 U.S. blast furnaces.

Published: October 25, 2008

The steel mills, big suppliers to many sectors of the economy, are shutting 17 of the nation’s 29 blast furnaces — a startling indicator of how quickly output is declining as corporate America struggles to adjust to the spreading crisis.

“We have seen a softening order book in the most dramatic ways in the last week,” said Tom Conway, a vice president of the United Steelworkers of America, adding that layoffs in the industry “are just starting now.”

Get ready for a tidal wave of BANKRUPT COMPANIES

In a report released Tuesday, ratings agency Standard & Poor's says there are 140 large U.S. companies in danger of not being able to pay their bills in the next few months, up nearly twofold from the beginning of this year. Among the troubled firms on the agency's list are such household names as clothing retailer Eddie Bauer, amusement park operator Six Flags and pizza chain Sbarro. Also on the list are doughnut baker Krispy Kreme and mobile technology titan Palm, as well as a number of the nation's largest airlines, including JetBlue and the corporate parents of United and American.Wickes Furniture and Sharper Image have already gone away. Whitehall Jewelers, Linens 'n Things and Shoe Pavillion are liquidating. And California discount department store Mervyns decided last week that it would go out of business after failing to find a buyer.