There will be a metalcasting revival someday, soon, perhaps, but until it’s clear that the industry is reborn it’s going to endure a series of sad demises.  We reported two of these closings within the past week, both of them in Indiana.  Neither one represents the end of a particular company, but rather the twists and turns necessary to sustain them in a manufacturing economy that’s struggling to come back to life.

Indiana has been notably hard-hit in this ordeal, and this report from there compares the ongoing business cycle to past recessions and recoveries. It also offers some examples and insights that demonstrate why recovery may take longer than forecast, and some of the incongruities of productivity and prosperity that I’ve referred to in the past.

The recession, not incidentally, is over. There have been indicators of economic growth for about six months now, the latest being that the U.S. Producer Price Index rose 1.4% in January, following a 0.4% increase in December. This is explained as the effects of factories increasing their levels of production, and that’s unquestionably a good thing.

But, assembling economic data points into a coherent and sustainable message is hard, because there are always so many points to reconcile.  Everyone is welcome to his opinions, but the truth is made up of lots of facts – and not every fact is easily dismissed.

This is one reason that we’ll never know the real effects of last year’s $787-billion federal stimulus package. (The cost, by the way, has been estimated upward by another $75 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.)

The stated purpose of the stimuls was to restart economic activity, and to rescue failing companies, especially in manufacturing. As we can see in Indiana and most other places, the only clear result has been to delay and distort market economics, mostly in favor of large employers at the expense of their smaller competitors and many of their suppliers.

Unfortunately there are more foundries and diecasters in the latter categories than in the former. There will be a reborn metalcasting industry, someday, but it might have emerged a bit sooner, without any hint of favoritism, and at less cost, without the effort to delay it from happening at all.