Consider these two announcements:

1. “March 26, 2008 – SEOUL – South Korea said on Wednesday it has started the sale of Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering Co., the world’s No. 3 shipbuilder, by putting up 50.4 percent stake worth $ 3.6 billion at current market prices.

“The long-awaited sale is expected to attract a host of bidders, ranging from steel makers looking to lock in a big buyer of their product to conglomerates seeking to invest in a business whose profit is set to double this year to 667 billion won …

“The sale could fetch nearly 5 trillion won ($ 5 billion), analysts said, taking into consideration the company’s strong business outlook, and competition could drive the price tag even higher …

“‘The deal looks attractive as Daewoo could generate 1 trillion won in annual pre-tax profit over the next several years. Even with the global economy slowing, top Korean companies are seeing orders continue coming in’. Daewoo already has an order backlog that should keep its dockyards busy until mid-2011, analysts said.”

2. “July 4, 2008 – SEOUL – South Korea’s Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering Co., the world’s third-largest shipyard, said Friday that it has won an order to build 16 container vessels for US$ 2.33 billion, the industry’s largest order to date …

“Shares of Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering were trading at 37,700 won on the Seoul bourse as of 9:24 a.m., up 3.14 percent.

“The shipbuilder has won orders valued at $ 9.83 billion so far this year to build 59 ships, accounting for 56 percent of its yearly target of $ 17.5 billion worth of orders.”

[They must be doing something right in South Korea.]

Now consider these three announcements:

1. “September 20, 2008 – SACRAMENTO – Unemployment in California rose for a fifth straight month to 7.7% in August, and economists predicted that recovery wouldn’t come soon, given the depth of the Wall Street financial crisis …

“‘The self-employed are really feeling the pain,’ said Esmael Adibi, an economist at Chapman University in Orange. Fixing what he called the ‘real economy’ of California – made up of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses – could be much more difficult than calming Wall Street with a proposed government bailout, he said.

“‘The real economy is like a ship. Whatever is going to turn it around is going to take time,’ Adibi said.”

“… as companies lay off workers, homeowners watch their equity shrink or disappear and 401(k) retirement funds plummet in value, said Stephen Levy, director and senior economist at the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy in Palo Alto.

“‘The unemployment numbers are a stark reminder that the economic downturn, the recession, was here before the Wall Street crisis, and will be here after the Wall Street crisis,’ Levy said …

“By the end of this year, an estimated 200,000 Californians could run out of unemployment benefits if Congress doesn’t act before recessing in October, said Maurice Emsellem, policy director of the National Employment Law Project, which advocates for the rights of low-wage workers.

“‘The economy is crashing,’ he said. ‘Congress and the president need to do something for the unemployed families.’”

2. “November 12, 2008 – NEW YORK – The Federal Reserve will deliver another interest rate cut to help the moribund US economy ring in the new year, but billions more in fiscal stimulus is needed to limit the current downturn, a Reuters poll showed on Monday.

“The world’s largest economy is hemorrhaging jobs, with a total of 1.2 million lost so far this year after the housing boom went bust and left a path of destruction from housing to the financial markets…

“‘Given the cascading weakness in the data, it looks prudent for the Fed to ease again,’ said analyst Dana Saporta. ‘That’s a change from what we were thinking just a few weeks ago. It’s just that the data came in even weaker than our pessimistic forecasts … It’s too late to avoid a recession. It’s our call that we are in a recession and have been for some time.’”

3. “November 13, 2008 – REUTERS – The number of US workers filing new claims for jobless benefits rose last week to 516,000 …

“Continuing claims reached 3.897 million for the week ended Nov. 1, the latest period for which data were available, which was an increase from 3.832 million the prior week and marked the most people filing for ongoing unemployment assistance in a quarter of a century.”

[Note: It’s pretty obvious that we in the U.S. are doing something wrong, so let’s think about it. Could shipbuilding have something to do with South Korea’s successes and our failures? And seeing that no one knows yet how to use the first $ 700 billion in fiscal stimulus funding, why not use it to revitalize our shipyards? If Daewoo, for example, is worth about $ 7 billion, why can’t we put 100 new shipyards on line with that $ 700 billion? Look at the resulting numbers. Each yard would employ about 20,000 workers, with each worker needing some16 supporting offsite workers. Each yard, therefore, would create about 340,000 employment opportunities, and 100 shipyards, of course, means the creation of about 34,000,000 new jobs. There is no other way, so why wait??]