The Murder of US Manufacturing By Martin Hutchinson FROM Asia Times Online

The collapse of the financial services bubble has, however, called into question three of Wall Street's most cherished beliefs about manufacturing:

First, Wall Street believes that financial services and other services can take the place of manufacturing, and that the United States can remain a prosperous economy thereby. Second, it believes that manufacturing tangible products is an intrinsically low-skill and uninteresting operation, so that the US would do much better to specialize in "symbol manipulation". Third, it believes that the decline in US manufacturing was and is inevitable, so that decline would have happened whatever strategies management had adopted, and whatever resources and attention it had devoted to manufacturing activities.

Selected Vocabulary
death-knell
tangible
typology
drudgery
paradigm