If you’re not a reliable partner how can you expect people to invest? If someone builds a factory in the US, as soon as masks are available from China again the administration will just drop them like a rock and start ordering from China for rock bottom prices again.
He said he wasn't expanding or making his people pull overtime only for hospitals to go to China.
How much was the cost difference? 10 cents versus 4 cents per mask.
You also might pay $5 for a hot dog at a stadium when you can buy them for $1 outside, so there's that.
Is that why the concession sales at the stadiums are hurting?
NYC had street vendors selling legitimate masks bought for example via supplier that normally would be selling to Home Depot, except home depot decided to do its patriotic duty ( i was amazed when they announced it ) and stopped selling N95 masks all together.
For example this is the stuff from a qualified vendor today:
https://nypost.com/2020/09/12/principals-rip-nyc-doe-for-sup...
If there was accountability and an actual, real probability of collecting on judgements internationally, I'd have no problem with globalization. The reality is unless you are a deep-pocketed (absolute minimum 7th exponent club) actor, odds of actually getting all the way through the other side of collections are less than slim. It's still bad odds when sourcing with an "isolationist" bias, but you can knock a couple exponents off, and I'll take order of magnitude differentials all day long.
If there was a way to secure non-gamed reviews, then I'd be much more open to globalization-produced goods, but I haven't found that yet. My current rough proxy for quality is to source commercial-rated duty cycle goods if they are available, research on trades discussion forums for discussion about the manufacturer, and work up an evaluation from there. But that's really time-consuming. No way do I now "trust the market" to shake out shady players.
If you want to "save money", then go ask the Chinese factories to sell you the masks now.
Here's the link:
> This is a cycle familiar to Bowen. During what he calls "peacetime," when there are no outbreaks, there are few buyers of masks. During an epidemic, there's suddenly limitless demand.
> "Imagine if, all at once, millions of people wanted to skateboard," Bowen says. "The skateboarding industry is not set up for spikes like that, and neither is the mask-making industry."
> Prestige Ameritech, for example, owns a limited number of machines that assemble, sew and shape the masks. A decade ago, it ramped up production in response to the swine flu outbreak by buying more machines and hiring 150 new workers.
> "We made a really big mistake," Bowen says of that decision. It took about four months to build the new machines, which are as long as a school bus and cost as much as $1 million.
> By the time they were ready, the swine flu crisis had ended, demand vaporized, and Prestige Ameritech almost went bankrupt. "One day — and it is literally almost like one day — it just quits. The demand is over, the phones stop ringing," Bowen says.
> To make matters worse, the hospitals and medical supply companies suddenly had a glut of masks; they stopped buying for months.
If I promise to buy a car from you for $100,000, and you spend $10,000 to make it, and I discover I don't need the car anymore, in most cases, I can walk away paying you $10,000. If you continued doing unneeded work, that'd be bad economics. If you could rake me over the coals and ask to me to pay $50k, that'd be exploitative. In most cases, the outcome of a broken contract is that I try to set things right for you by either:
* Paying you costs incurred
* Paying you expected profits
* Or similar.
Courts calculate damages by a range of formulas, which then sets standards for how business is conducted, and in most cases, people don't go to court but just agree to pay damages.
This is foreign to how most people think about agreements; it's a very different culture. But if you talk to lawyers or executives, that's how they reason about contracts.
In the case with Phillips, they already delivered 1/4th of the ventilators, there are reports all over the place stating that these were overpaid for. Of course the government overpaid for these. They were in a situation were they had to. Phillips even made indications in their earnings reports that these are contributing significant profit.
These manufacturers would not hesitate to enter one of these contracts again in the future.
Someone should investigate how it came to be that anesthetizing COVID-19 patients and sticking a tube into their lungs was the standard treatment, until the front-line medical teams rebelled. [1]
[0] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/Ventilators-aren-t-a-pan...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-ventil...