Economists were probably too busy watching markets gyrate to contemplate last month’s big news in science. Physicists detected particles travelling faster than light, which, if the reading was accurate, means time travel is possible.

Now, let’s play a quick mind experiment that would surely captivate the deans of the dismal science: Pretend you have just been transported 10 years into the future to see how this incipient global crisis pans out. It would be hard to find anyone who isn’t desperate to know.

What if, a decade from now, the U.S. comes out the winner of today’s market chaos at the expense of Europe and China?

This intriguing contrarian view is the subject of “The American Phoenix,” a new book by Hong Kong-based economist Diana Choyleva and her Lombard Street Research colleague Charles Dumas. Bargain bins are loaded with China-crash titles. What’s different about this book is that it turns all we think we know about the interplay between the Group of Two on its head.

If the last few years taught us anything, it’s that the unthinkable has an uncanny knack of happening......

By William Selway
Nov. 2 (Bloomberg) -- Michigan’s economy is recovering from the recession at the second-fastest pace in the U.S., lifted by reviving carmakers and local manufacturers, according to a new Bloomberg index that tracks the pace of state growth.

The home to the U.S. automobile industry was topped only by North Dakota, where an oil boom is raising incomes and boosting government coffers at the nation’s quickest rate. California, Massachusetts and Illinois round out the top five in the Bloomberg Economic Evaluation of States Index, which uses data on real estate, jobs, taxes and stock prices to gauge the growth rate in 50 states and the District of Columbia.....

By IAN BREMMER and NOURIEL ROUBINI

It's no wonder that global markets are so jittery. The world's three largest economies can't continue along their current paths, and everybody knows it. Investors watch nervously for signs that China is headed toward a hard landing, that America will sink back into recession, and that the euro zone will simply implode.

In all three cases, kicking the can down the road has staved off disaster so far, but the cans are getting bigger and heavier. Which economy will be the first to stumble on its problems?

Three years after sales tumbled to the lowest in more than a quarter-century, the U.S. auto market may be emerging as the safest bet for predictable and profitable growth as China, India and Brazil slow.

“The U.S. is now the high-growth market in the world as much as India or China,” said Xavier Mosquet, senior partner for Boston Consulting Group in Detroit and an adviser in 2009 to the government rescues of General Motors Co. (GM) and Chrysler Group LLC. “The worst thing five years ago was to be a U.S. automaker or supplier. Now it’s the best thing to be.”

U.S. car and light truck sales probably rose at a faster pace than China’s vehicle sales last year for the first time since at least 1998, fueled by a recovery in consumer confidence......

Live in South Korea? Want to buy an American car?

Perhaps you should check out the Toyota Camry.

The Japanese automaker announced today that it will begin exporting Camry’s produced at its Georgetown, Ky., plant to South Korea starting in January.

The move was made possible by a recent free trade pact between the United States and South Korea that lowered the tariff on imported cars from 8 to 4 percent, and will eventually wipe it out completely. Automakers are also not required to recertify their vehicles to meet South Korean safety standards, a costly process, if they are sold in low volumes.

Toyota expects to deliver just 6,000 Camrys in South Korea annually. It will be the first time that U.S.-built versions of the popular model will be sold outside of North America. Several other Toyota products made in the U.S., including the Tundra pickup truck, are already exported to 19 countries.

A strong Japanese yen has made it unprofitable to export cars like the Camry from Japan. In September Toyota said it would stop shipping Japanese-build Camrys to the U.S., and this past week, Nissan COO Toshiyuki Shiga announced that his company will no longer build cars in Japan that are developed solely for export.

The United States may be on the verge of bringing back manufacturing jobs from China.

Harold Sirkin, along with Michael Zinser and Douglas Hohner (all experts from the Boston Consulting Group – a leading business advising firm), says that outsourcing manufacturing to China is not as cheap as it used to be and that the United States is poised to bring back jobs from China. The three consultants first reached this conclusion in a recently published study titled “Made in America, Again: Why Manufacturing Will Return to the U.S.”

Many companies, especially in the auto and furniture industries, moved plants overseas once China opened its doors to free trade and foreign investment in the last few decades. Labor was cheaper for American companies – less than $1 per hour according to the BCG report. Today, labor costs in China have risen dramatically, and shipping and fuel costs have skyrocketed. As China’s economy has expanded, and China has built new factories all across the country, the demand for workers has risen. As a result, wages are up as new companies compete to hire the best workers.

“The tilt is now getting lower,” Sirkin says. “We think somewhere around 2015 it’ll look flat and may start to tilt in the U.S. favor at that point in time.”

By 2015, it will only be about 10 percent cheaper to manufacture in China.

“We have to recognize one thing,” Sirkin told NBC’s Harry Smith in an interview to air Monday on Rock Center with Brian Williams. “The average Chinese worker is about a quarter as productive as the average U.S. worker.”

“It’ll be a major impact. Our projections are, when you take the manufacturing jobs and then the service jobs that get created alongside those, that we will add two to three million jobs to the U.S. workforce.”

The U.S. is already seeing examples of this – starting in Lincolnton, North Carolina.

Rock Center has been following Bruce Cochrane of Lincolnton Furniture as he brings his family business back to the U.S. and re-opens the family furniture plant. Cochrane was invited to the White House last week for a forum on job creation with President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.

“Now, you don't have be a big manufacturer to insource jobs,” Obama said. “Bruce Cochrane's family had manufactured furniture in North Carolina for five generations. But in 1996, as jobs began shifting to Asia, the family sold their business, and Bruce spent time in China and Vietnam as a consultant for American furniture makers. But while he was there, he noticed something he didn't expect: their consumers actually wanted to buy things made in America. So he came home and started a new company, Lincolnton Furniture, which operates out of the old family factories. He's even re-hired many of the former workers from his family business. “

According to BCG, another manufacturer, Sleek Audio, moved production of its headphones from Chinese suppliers to a plant in Florida. Ford Motor Company is bringing back 2,000 jobs from China after striking an agreement with the United Auto Workers. Sirkin says it’s good news for the economy even though wages will be lower in those jobs than they were previously.

Sirkin believes fears that United States manufacturing is in decline are overstated and notes that the U.S. is still a manufacturing giant. In 2010, China provided 19.8 percent of global manufacturing value added. The U.S. accounted for a marginally less 19.4 percent, which, according to Boston Consulting, was “a share that has declined only slightly over the past three decades.”

Editor's Note: Harry Smith's full report, 'Made in America,' airs Monday, January 16 at 10pm/9c on NBC's Rock Center with Brian Williams.

When Sonja Zozula and Jerry Anderson founded LightSaver Technologies Inc. in 2009, everyone told them they should make their emergency lights for homeowners in China.

After two years of outsourcing to factories there, last winter they shifted production to Carlsbad, California, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) from their home in San Clemente. “It’s probably 30 percent cheaper to manufacture in China,” Anderson says. Besides hassles including shipping, “it’s a question of, ‘How do I value my time at three in the morning when I have to talk to China?’” he says.

As costs in China rise and owners consider the challenges of using factories 12,000 miles and 12 time zones away, many small companies have decided manufacturing overseas isn’t worth the trouble. American production is “increasingly competitive,” says Harry Moser, founder of the Reshoring Initiative, a group of companies and trade associations trying to bring factory jobs back to the U.S. “In the last two years there’s been a dramatic increase” in the amount of work returning.....

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Etched into the base of Google’s new wireless home media player that was introduced on Wednesday is its most intriguing feature. On the underside of the Nexus Q is a simple inscription: “Designed and Manufactured in the U.S.A.”
The Google executives and engineers who decided to build the player here are engaged in an experiment in American manufacturing. “We’ve been absent for so long, we decided, ‘Why don’t we try it and see what happens?’ ” said Andy Rubin, the Google executive who leads the company’s Android mobile business.

Google is not saying a lot about its domestic manufacturing, declining even to disclose publicly where the factory is in Silicon Valley. It also is not saying much about the source of many of its parts in the United States. And Mr. Rubin said the company was not engaged in a crusade.

Still, the project will be closely watched by other electronics companies. It has become accepted wisdom that consumer electronics products can no longer be made in the United States. During the last decade, abundant low-cost Chinese labor and looser environmental regulations have virtually erased what was once a vibrant American industry.

Since the 1990s, one American company after another, including Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Apple, has become a design and marketing shell, with production shifted to contract manufacturers in Shenzhen and elsewhere in China.

Now that trend may be showing early signs of reversing.

It’s a trickle, but some American companies are again making products in the United States. While many of those companies have been small, like ET Water Systems, there have also been some highly visible moves by America’s largest consumer and industrial manufacturers. General Electric and Caterpillar, for example, have moved assembly operations back to the United States in the last year. (Airbus, a European company, is said to be near a deal to build jets in Alabama.)

There is no single reason for the change. Rising labor and energy costs have made manufacturing in China significantly more expensive; transportation costs have risen; companies have become increasingly aware of the risks of the theft of intellectual property when products are made in China; and in a business where time-to-market is a competitive advantage, it is easier for engineers to drive 10 minutes on the freeway to the factory than to fly for 16 hours.

Standing over a small tank of water in a Brooklyn factory, Zbigniew Solecki plunged a gleaming faucet into the water, then shot air at 60 pounds per square inch into it. He watched for rising bubbles, a sign that an unseen fissure had, unacceptably, let the air stream out. It is a rite of passage that Mr. Solecki performs dozens of times a day.

“Every last piece is pressure-tested before it goes out the door to China,” said Jack Abel, the engineer who built the factory. “Or anywhere else.”

Yes, he did say China.

Mr. Abel’s company, Watermark Designs in Brooklyn, is standing history on its head: it is making plumbing parts and shipping them to China.

After generations of manufacturers in New York and across the United States folded because they were unable to compete with imports, Watermark, with its only factory in the East New York section of Brooklyn, has managed to crack the code. Instead of trying to make Watermark’s products cheaper, Mr. Abel has prospered by first making them more expensive — offering custom-made fixtures unique to each building — and then figuring out how to do that at lower cost. The company has supplied thousands of fixtures to six new luxury hotels and condominiums being built in Shanghai, Macau and Hong Kong.

“The days of mass producing in New York City are gone,” Mr. Abel said. “If you were producing nuts and bolts by the tens of thousands 50 years ago, you’re not going to do it today. But creativity, or uniqueness or design is definitely something that can flourish in New York.”

Just as they have in many parts of the country, exports have taken up the slack for the business that Watermark lost during the economic downturn that began in 2008. The New York metropolitan area led the nation last year in exports, rising to $105 billion, its highest ever, from $85 billion in 2010, according to a report released last week by the International Trade Administration, a branch of the United States Department of Commerce that supports companies doing business overseas.

Fencing and flooring for dance clubs, stadiums, and big tents are being made in the Bronx by Signature Fencing and Flooring and shipped to South Africa, Japan, Britain and India. From Medford, on Long Island, Enecon, which makes corrosion-resistant coatings for industrial equipment, ships to 65 countries.

Manufacturing jobs in New York have declined by about 80 percent from a high of 1.1 million jobs in 1947, all but shutting down what had been a heavily trod avenue into the middle class for immigrants and people without advanced educations.

Mr. Abel, who was born in Israel, grew up in the Bronx and studied engineering at the City College of New York and Columbia University, started his business in 1976 in a small metal plating company that his father ran from a 2,000-square-foot storefront in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. For a number of years, it did well and grew by refinishing inexpensive parts and selling them through neighborhood bath stores and the early home improvement centers. Mr. Abel moved into supplying high-end fixtures just as the city was entering a period of luxury construction.

It was a strong strategy, made possible, Mr. Abel said, by his son Avi, who joined the business after graduating from the State University of New York at Binghamton (now Binghamton University) and among other things, overhauled its design capabilities. Around 2006, Watermark bought a three-dimensional printer for $60,000. It works like an ink jet printer, except that it squirts molten plastic to build a form, instead of ink onto paper.

Robert Brenner, 26, a design engineer for the company, showed a plastic prototype of a handle made to an architect’s specifications. “This took three to four hours,” he said.

After the prototype is approved, Watermark tunes its lathes and milling machines to make the actual parts. In such a world, cheap labor is a dwindling advantage. “I can get the best equipment,” Mr. Abel said. “I can’t get someone to operate it — machinists, machine programmers, people with knowledge how to operate sophisticated equipment, they’re not there.”

Nearly 40 years after starting in the storefront, the company employs 45 people in 55,000 square feet. Most of the workers have been with the company for 10 years or more. Besides high-tech equipment, the company now has something else that wasn’t available years ago — Brooklyn chic.

“My son says we should stand on a box and shout it loud: ‘This is made not only in the U.S.A., but in Brooklyn,’ ” Mr. Abel said, “It’s what Paris had been. We have become a design mecca.”

Debbie Werner is the face of an American workers’ revolution.

In a break with decades of U.S. auto-union tradition, the prevailing wage paid to new unionized autoworkers is less than that of the average laborer producing items ranging from metal and wood products to food and beverages.

Werner has lived through it all: She joined General Motors Corp. in 2008 before its bankruptcy, lost her job when the factory closed and then was rehired in 2011 when it opened again after the bailout -- joining thousands of new workers earning about half what autoworkers were paid before 2007 and without traditional pensions and retiree health care.

Part of President Barack Obama’s re-election platform is his 2009 decision to support an $85 billion bailout for the U.S. auto industry, the subject of a vigorous exchange at this week’s presidential debate. Less understood is the new class of autoworkers who, even before the bailout, started taking jobs that gave up decades of union gains and agreed to an uncertain economic future to bring thousands of jobs back to American factories.....

For much of the past decade, General Electric’s storied Appliance Park, in Louisville, Kentucky, appeared less like a monument to American manufacturing prowess than a memorial to it.

The very scale of the place seemed to underscore its irrelevance. Six factory buildings, each one the size of a large suburban shopping mall, line up neatly in a row. The parking lot in front of them measures a mile long and has its own traffic lights, built to control the chaos that once accompanied shift change. But in 2011, Appliance Park employed not even a tenth of the people it did in its heyday. The vast majority of the lot’s spaces were empty; the traffic lights looked forlorn.

In 1951, when General Electric designed the industrial park, the company’s ambition was as big as the place itself; GE didn’t build an appliance factory so much as an appliance city. Five of the six factory buildings were part of the original plan, and early on Appliance Park had a dedicated power plant, its own fire department, and the first computer ever used in a factory. The facility was so large that it got its own ZIP code (40225). It was the headquarters for GE’s appliance division, as well as the place where just about all of the appliances were made.....

In an exclusive interview with Brian Williams airing tonight at 10pm/9c on NBC’s “Rock Center,” Apple CEO Tim Cook announced one of the existing Mac lines will be manufactured exclusively in the United States next year. Mac fans will have to wait to see which Mac line it will be because Apple, widely known for its secrecy, left it vague. Cook's announcement may or may not confirm recent rumors in the blogosphere sparked by iMacs inscribed in the back with “Assembled in USA.”
ROCK CENTER EXCLUSIVE

“We’ve been working for years on doing more and more in the United States,” Cook told Williams. It was Cook’s first interview since taking over from his visionary former boss, Steve Jobs, who resigned due to health reasons in August 2011. Jobs died on October 5, 2011, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

The announcement could be good news for a country that has been struggling with an unemployment rate of around 8 percent for some time and has been bleeding good-paying factory jobs to lower-wage nations such as China.

Cook, who joined Apple in 1998, said he believes it’s important to bring more jobs to the United States. Apple would not reveal where exactly the Macs will be manufactured.

“When you back up and look at Apple’s effect on job creation in the United States, we estimate that we’ve created more than 600,000 jobs now,” said Cook. Those jobs, not all Apple hires, vary from research and development jobs in California to retail store hires to third-party app developers. Apple already has data centers in North Carolina, Nevada and Oregon and plans to build a new one in Texas.

Ronnie Polidoro / NBC News

Apple has taken a lot of heat over the past couple of years after a rash of suicides at plants in China run by Foxconn drew attention to working conditions at the world’s largest contract supplier. Apple and other manufacturers who have their gadgets produced by Foxconn were forced to defend production in China. Earlier this year, Apple hired the nonprofit Fair Labor Association to examine working conditions at Foxconn, which makes some of Apple’s most popular products: iPhones, iPods and iPads.

Given that, why doesn’t Apple leave China entirely and manufacture everything in the U.S.? “It’s not so much about price, it’s about the skills,” Cook told Williams.

WATCH VIDEO: Apple CEO announces 'Made in America' plans

Echoing a theme stated by many other companies, Cook said he believes the U.S. education system is failing to produce enough people with the skills needed for modern manufacturing processes. He added, however, that he hopes the new Mac project will help spur others to bring manufacturing back to the U.S.

“The consumer electronics world was really never here,” Cook said. “It’s a matter of starting it here.”

Cook said he still misses Jobs, his friend and mentor, but that Jobs’ advice to him before he died was to do the things he thinks are right and not try to guess “what Steve would do.”

“I loved Steve dearly, and miss him dearly,” Cook told Williams. “And one of the things he did for me, that removed a gigantic burden that would have normally existed, is he told me, on a couple of occasions before he passed away, to never question what he would have done. Never ask the question, ‘What Steve would do,’ to just do what’s right.”

Apple today is worth about 43 percent more than when Cook took over. Under his leadership, Apple has released three new iMac models, two iPhones, two iPads, and the iPad mini.

That’s not to say there haven’t been some speed bumps. Most notable was the release of “Apple Maps,” which replaced the Google Maps app on the iPhone and was widely panned for misleading directions. Cook admits they screwed up.

“On Maps, a few years ago, we decided that we wanted to provide customers features that we didn’t have in the current edition of Maps,” Cook said, “It [Maps] didn’t meet our customers’ expectation, and our expectations of ourselves are even higher than our customers’. However, I can tell you, so we screwed up.”

The Maps debacle led to the defenestration of some company executives, including reportedly Richard Williamson, who oversaw the mapping team.

“We screwed up and we are putting the weight of the company behind correcting it,” Cook told Williams.

Customers still snapped up the iPhone 5, however. According to Apple, five million of them were sold in their first weekend after the device’s launch in September.

Speed bump No. 2 was the redesigned connector for the iPhone 5, which was widely criticized by many because it didn’t fit many of the accessories Apple fans had already purchased for their earlier iPhone versions. It forced them to purchase an adapter, which some criticized as an inelegant solution. Others argue, however, that the new connector was worth it because it allowed Apple to make a smaller device.

NBC News

“It was one of those things where we couldn’t make this product with that connector,” Cook said, “But let me tell you, the product is so worth it.”

What’s next for Apple? Did Cook leave us with a clue?

“When I go into my living room and turn on the TV, I feel like I have gone backwards in time by 20 to 30 years,” Cook told Williams. “It’s an area of intense interest. I can’t say more than that.”

General Motors has announced that the next generation of the Chevrolet Camaro will once again be built in the United States, specifically at the Lansing Grand River Assembly Plant in Lansing, MI. The current Camaro has been assembled in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, since its introduction in 2010.

The automaker cites "lower capital investment and improved production efficiencies" as key reasons for the move – indeed, the Camaro is the only rear-wheel-drive vehicle made in Oshawa; the Buick Regal and Cadillac XTS are currently manufactured there, and the upcoming Chevrolet Impala will join the front-wheel-drive group in 2013. Meanwhile, the Lansing facility currently produces two rear-wheel-drive vehicles – the Cadillac ATS and CTS – which makes the Camaro a natural fit.

The Canadian Auto Workers Union is, as expected, none too pleased by the "callous and poorly thought-out" announcement, "reacting in anger and frustration" according to a statement. CAW National President Ken Lewenza added, "General Motors has once again shown a complete and utter disregard for its workers and also Canadians in general, whose tax dollars kept the company out of bankruptcy."

The CAW says that "GM must replace lost Camaro production on a one-to-one basis." The automaker's own statement says it will "continue to meet the production targets agreed to with the Canadian and Ontario governments during the 2009 restructuring." In any case, production of the current Camaro will continue in Ontario until the next-gen model is ready to go on sale sometime within the next few years.

Ford Motor Co., the second-largest U.S. automaker, plans to begin making in Ohio a small four- cylinder engine that it builds in Spain, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Ford’s move to build the 2-liter engine at its factory in Brook Park, Ohio, eventually will create as many as 750 jobs, said the person, who asked not to be identified ahead of an announcement tomorrow. The Dearborn, Michigan-based company has been building the engine in Valencia, Spain. Kristina Adamski, a Ford spokeswoman, declined to comment.

Chief Executive Officer Alan Mulally revived Ford by overhauling the company’s lineup and boosting the fuel efficiency of models such as the Focus compact car. Ford is hiring in the U.S., where auto sales climbed last year by the most since 1984, and retrenching in Europe, where new-vehicle registrations hit a 17-year low in 2012.

“You have to build where the market is,” Mike Gammella, president of UAW Local 1250, which represents the Ohio plant’s 1,065 hourly workers, said today in a telephone interview. “We’re seeing the outsourcing craze come back around. Outsourcing wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.”

Ford joins companies including Apple Inc. in reversing shifts in manufacturing to overseas markets because of lower labor costs. Apple last year year pledged to invest in making Mac computers in the U.S. Since 2007, the United Auto Workers has agreed to let automakers hire new workers who forgo traditional retiree health care and pensions as well as work for lower wages than more senior employees in exchange for jobs that would have gone to other markets.

Manufacturing Shift

The U.S. has gained 490,000 manufacturing jobs since February 2010, when factory employment slumped to a seven-decade low. The shift of jobs back to the U.S. from China may contribute to 2 million to 3 million new jobs by the end of the decade, Boston Consulting Group said in a March 2012 report.

“We’ve become the low-cost producer and the highest- quality producer,” Gammella said.

The Valencia plant’s 2-liter EcoBoost engines are used in the company’s Focus, Explorer, Edge and Fusion models, according to Ford’s website. The Ohio plant produces the 3.5-liter V-6 EcoBoost used in the Ford F-150 pickup, the company said on a separate page of its website.

Deliveries of the Focus surged 40 percent in the U.S. last year to 245,922, topping General Motors Co.’s Chevrolet Cruze and Hyundai Motor Co.’s Elantra, according to researcher Autodata Corp. The Focus was the third-best selling compact behind Honda Motor Co.’s Civic and Toyota Motor Corp.’s Corolla.

The Associated Press reported Ford’s plans for the Ohio plant yesterday. Ford fell 0.9 percent to $12.87 at 10:50 a.m. New York time.

A curious thing is happening among American shoppers. More people are taking a moment to flip over an item or fish for a label and ask, is it "Made in the USA?"

Walmart, the nation's largest retailer, earlier this year announced it will boost sourcing of U.S. products by $50 billion during the next 10 years. General Electricis investing $1 billion through 2014 to revitalize its U.S. appliances business and create more than 1,500 U.S. jobs.

Mom-and-pops are also engineering entire business strategies devoted to locally made goods — everything from toys to housewares. And it's not simply patriotism and desire for perceived safer products which are altering shopping habits.

The recession, and still flat recovery for many Americans, have created a painful realization. All those cheap goods made in China and elsewhere come at a price — lost U.S. manufacturing jobs. A growing pocket of consumers, in fact, are connecting the economic dots between their shopping carts — brimming with foreign-made stuff — and America's future.

They're calculating the trade-offs of paying a little more for locally-made goods. "The Great Recession certainly brought that home, and highlighted the fact that so many jobs have been lost," said James Cerruti, senior partner for strategy and research at consulting firm Brandlogic. "People have become aware of that."

"'Made in the USA' is known for one thing, quality," said Robert von Goeben, co-founder of California-based Green Toys. All of their products from teething toys to blocks are made domestically and shipped to 75 countries.

"We are reaching a tipping point, where Americans are relearning its competitive advantage," von Goeben said. "It's not about the cheapest product, but the best quality product."

With oil production at a twenty year high and predictions of a manufacturing renaissance for the U.S. economy, one of the world's largest investment banks has detailed how the "shale revolution" will negatively affect emerging markets such as China.

Hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," has helped lead a revolution in gas and oil production in the United States. The new technology is unlocking oil and shale gas resources, spurring economic activity and giving industry a competitive edge with less expensive gas and electricity prices.

These developments could lead to the industrialization of the U.S. economy and could deliver sustainable growth, Morgan Stanley said in a research note on Wednesday.

With the help of cheap energy, manufacturing will pick up and move down the ladder to capturing the production of less "sophisticated" goods (computers, fabricated metals and automobiles) currently manufactured in emerging nations. As a result, the United States will likely compete with emerging markets for market share rather than being a consumer, Morgan Stanley said.

"As the manufacturing renaissance takes hold in the U.S., the move down the value-added ladder in the U.S. is likely to clash with China's need to further increase the sophistication of its manufacturing base," it said.

And as the bank details, China needs to move up that ladder to not only produce medium-term growth but to protect against economic stagnation, the "middle-income trap" and move from an emerging to a developed market.

U.S. crude oil production exceeded an average 7 million barrels per day in November and December 2012, the highest volume since December 1992, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) said last week. The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects it could even leapfrog Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world's biggest oil producer by 2020.

A continued fall in U.S. oil imports means North America could become a net oil exporter by around 2030, according to the IEA, and the United States could become almost self-sufficient in energy by 2035.

Toyota Motor Co. President Akio Toyoda confirmed today the maker will invest more than $500 million in its Georgetown, Kentucky plant to move production of one of its Lexus luxury vehicles to the U.S. for the first time.

The recently updated Lexus ES sedan will begin rolling off the line at the maker’s Georgetown plant by 2015, said Toyoda, grandson of the automaker’s founder. The move, he noted, reflects the fact that the U.S. is the largest market for the luxury brand – while also sidestepping the negative impact of lopsided exchange rates that have made it increasingly difficult to continue producing vehicles in Japan.

$147 million tax break yields US-made Lexus
The incentive helped seal a deal with Toyota to move nearly all production of the ES luxury vehicle to Kentucky.
By Aimee Picchi 22 hours ago

Toyota's (TM +1.05%) luxury Lexus ES will soon be "Made in the U.S.A.," and all it took was $146.5 million in tax breaks from Kentucky.


The automaker is adding production capacity to its Georgetown plant, where it will build the Lexus ES starting in 2015, Reuters reports. Toyota's website touts two models for the Lexus ES, starting at about $36,000 and $39,000.


The plan marks the first time the luxury model will be made outside of Japan, with the Kentucky plant eventually producing nearly all ES models sold in the U.S. and Canada. The hybrid version of the ES will continue to be manufactured in Japan, however.


The plan could bring a long-term investment of $531 million over 10 years from Toyota and create 750 jobs, Consumerist reports...

By CHRISTINA ROGERS and NEAL E. BOUDETTE
MARYSVILLE, Ohio—The U.S. auto industry, in tatters just four years ago, is emerging as an export powerhouse, driven by favorable exchange rates and labor costs in a trend experts say could drive business for many years.

In a sign of the turnaround, Honda Motor Co 7267.TO +2.70% ., once a big importer of Japanese-made cars, says it expects to export more vehicles from North America—with nearly all of them coming from its U.S. factories—than it brings in from Japan by the end of 2014.

Last year, more than one million cars and light trucks were exported from U.S. auto plants, the highest recorded and a more than threefold rise from 2003, according to the U.S. International Trade Administration.

More competitive labor costs and restructurings that closed unproductive factories have made American auto plants tougher competitors in the global market. Some are also looking at U.S. production as a way to serve booming emerging markets.....

The Moto X is on its way. The long-anticipated Android phone — expected to be the first truly Google-influenced product from Motorola since Google acquired the company back in 2012 — is due to be unveiled in New York City on August 1st. Already, the physical design and basically all of the phone’s technical details have already leaked. But there’s one aspect of the phone that Motorola was promoting months ahead of the leaks: that it’s made in America.

"THE FIRST SMARTPHONE EVER ASSEMBLED DOMESTICALLY."

"Available this summer, every Moto X sold in the USA will be assembled in Fort Worth, Texas, making it the first smartphone ever assembled domestically," wrote Motorola spokesperson Danielle McNally in May, following comments made to similar effect by Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside at the 2013 All Things D conference. In fact, Motorola’s assembly partner for the phone, a contract manufacturing company called Flextronics, said it planned to create 2,000 new jobs in the Fort Worth area. Even leaked images of the Moto X appear to contain a Texas flag design as the default wallpaper.

But while the Moto X purports to be the first smartphone assembled in the US, Google and Motorola are hardly the only big-name brands in tech using patriotism to move product these days. Apple CEO Tim Cook made headlines last December when he announced in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek that Apple would be making a product in the US this year. That product turned out to be the bold, new, trashcan-shaped Mac Pro, first unveiled at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in July.


Apple's new American-made Mac Pro was unveiled at WWDC 2013.

"THERE’S NO DOUBT THAT ‘MADE IN AMERICA’ ADVERTISING IS EFFECTIVE."

In fact, Apple kicked off WWDC with an emotional animated video that ended with the phrase "designed by Apple in California," which has appeared on Apple devices for years. But the company is clearly emphasizing its home state more now than ever before. Going forward, new versions of Apple's Mac OS X operating system will take the names of places in California, beginning with the latest, 10.9 Mavericks, due to hit this fall. And "designed by Apple in California" is now the leading slogan for a new marketing campaign used in Apple video and print ads.



Not to be left out, even PC maker Lenovo is getting on the made in America bandwagon, opening a new ThinkPad manufacturing facility in North Carolina earlier this year, which it said will create over 100 new local jobs. Clearly, something is driving some of the most important companies in consumer tech to promote their affiliations with the US more today than they have in decades. But what? "There’s no doubt that ‘Made in America’ advertising is effective," said Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM), a nonprofit trade group founded in 2007 to represent steelworkers and other US industrial laborers. "It’s not limited to tech gadgets."

To his point, a recent survey by the Boston Consulting Group found that 80 percent of 5,000 consumers were willing to pay more for products made in America, including electronics. The same study found Chinese consumers were also willing to pay more for American-made products. "You can certainly move a product off the shelf with that kind of advertising," Paul said. "You can also generate more support from politicians, because if you are building products and hiring workers in communities in the US, the public officials in those areas will be more invested in your outcome as well."

"I DON’T THINK GOOGLE, APPLE AND LENOVO WOULD BE DOING THIS IF IT WEREN’T IN THE INTEREST OF THEIR SHAREHOLDERS."

While he acknowledges the political and PR benefits that tech companies can achieve by moving some production back to the US, Paul doesn’t think Apple and Google’s recent moves are just cynical marketing ploys. "I don’t think Google, Apple and Lenovo would be doing this — shifting hi-tech manufacturing back to the United States — if it weren’t in the interest of their shareholders. They have to have a reason to believe it will be successful and profitable." Paul pointed to several factors at work that are making China, currently the world's largest manufacturer, decidedly less attractive for the purposes of consumer tech assembly: rapidly rising worker wages, the fact that the Chinese workforce is declining relative to the overall size of the the population, and the slow but inevitable increase in the value of its currency.

Two other trends in the US are also making it into a more attractive electronics manufacturing hub: a depressed labor market and faltering worker wages. "You have to think that these companies [Apple, Google] are looking down the road and saying, ‘The first year we do this, we might lose money’, but five years down the road, ‘We made right call.’" Paul explained.


A graph showing manufacturing costs by country as percentages of average US manufacturing costs over time. (Credit: AlixPartners).

BY 2015, MANUFACTURING COSTS IN CHINA WILL BE ON PAR WITH THE US, ONE STUDY SUGGESTS

It’s true that for now, manufacturing in the US is more expensive than going abroad. But the situation is rapidly changing, and if current trends continue, by 2015, manufacturing costs in China will be on par with the US, according to one forecast by AlixPartners, a global business advisory firm. Still, in the nearer term, the higher manufacturing costs of American-made products often get passed on to the consumer. See Google Glass, also assembled in California, with a $1,500 price tag, and Google’s failed Nexus Q media computer which went on sale in the summer of 2012 for $299. Those were both products designed for niche audiences, meaning that Google could justify the additional manufacturing costs on its end, and higher prices for consumers. While the Mac Pro certainly falls into that category, Google’s Moto X does not. In order to find success with a mass audience, it will need to come in at a price that the average consumer can swallow.


Google's failed Nexus Q streamer, repurposed as a doorstop.

Other trade analysts don’t think Google's and Apple's new American-made products amount to much in terms of actual global economic impact. "There are no indications that these two announcements [Moto X and Mac Pro] are more than simply one-off cases," said Ron Hira, associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and the author of the 2008 book Outsourcing America: The True Cost of Shipping Jobs Overseas and What Can Be Done About It. "If these were part of a real trend we’d be seeing it show up in the trade data," Hira noted. "It hasn't ... this is more PR than anything else."

"CEOS AND OWNERS HAVE NO STAKE IN AMERICA."

Hira added that the situation with tech companies today differs substantially from back in the 1980s, the last time the "made in America" label was used to promote big US industries — namely automobiles, steel, and semiconductors. Hira said because tech companies have spent years converting their supply chains to overseas operations, predominantly in Asia, that "the CEOs and owners have no stake in America," Hira argued. "Their interests are not aligned with America’s interests."


Google Glass: Explorer Edition.

Hira said it was also an open question just how much of each device — Mac Pro and Moto X — would actually be made in the US. But there is a legal limit on that, at least: in 1997, the US Federal Trade Commission codified that for a product to be fairly advertised as "Made in America" or "Made in the USA," it must be "all or virtually all" created here. As the FTC explains: "‘All or virtually all’" means that all significant parts and processing that go into the product must be of US origin. That is, the product should contain no — or negligible — foreign content."

"THE QUESTION IN MY MIND IS WHETHER CONSUMERS WILL REALLY CARE."

Even if Google and Apple’s quest to associate their brands with America is primarily an advertising ploy, as Hira suggests, the question remains to what extent that might help buoy product sales above a more geographically neutral advertising campaign. "The question in my mind is whether consumers will really care," said Gary Pisano, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and the co-author of the 2012 book Producing Prosperity: Why America Needs a Manufacturing Renaissance.

"Will American consumers like Apple products more because they are ‘made in America’?" Pisano asked. "[I‘m] not sure American consumers (or any others) are looking at the back of their electronic devices to see where they are made and making a choice based on that." Pisano pointed out that for some product categories, nationalistic associations do make a difference to consumers: fashionable clothes and shoes from Italy and cars from Germany, for example. When it comes to consumer electronics, Pisano notes that Japan, and more broadly, Asia as a continent already has a fairly strong reputation for making quality products. "I would not advise companies to manufacture those kind of products in America just for the branding," he told The Verge. "I would do it to be close to the market and close to the company's design centers."

"IT DOESN’T MATTER IF IT WAS MANUFACTURED IN CHINA OR ON THE MOON, IF IT DOESN'T HAVE THE RIGHT FUNCTIONALITY, IT'S NOT GOING TO SELL."


A photograph of the American flag planted on the moon by NASA Apollo 11 astronauts. (Credit: NASA)

Merely slapping a "made in America" label on something doesn’t guarantee it will be a hit, of course. The association didn’t stop American automakers from falling behind Japanese competitors in the 1980s. When it comes to the new tech patriotism, Apple’s own "Designed by Apple in California" video ad tested poorly in a recent consumer survey, at least compared to other previous Apple ad campaigns. And lest we forget, Google's American-made Nexus Q media computer released in 2012 has not only sold poorly, but has basically become a paperweight thanks to a recent update. Acknowledging the failure of the Nexus Q, AAM president Scott Paul told The Verge: "It doesn’t matter if it was manufactured in China or on the moon, if it doesn’t have the right functionality, it’s not going to sell."