re: #275 Olsonist

An alternate explanation of the same facts is that a profiteer got some cheap crap sent over from China and sold it to desperate people. This was not an inability of America to produce quality drywall unless you can prove that. This was an ability of someone to sell cheap drywall.

No one is saying the US can’t produce good drywall. Of course we can, and we do every day.

What we couldn’t do was create from whole cloth the capacity to produce additional millions of square feet of drywall on very short notice. I further suspect (but do not know) that the domestic producers did the math and saw that spending a lot of capital to gear up to fill a one or two year demand spike wasn’t worth it. Instead, they ran their plants at full capacity and that was the best they could do.

The importers of the Chinese drywall weren’t bad people. They were simply trying to fill orders the best way they could. Some were even domestic producers who imported some Chinese drywall on the side to fulfill demand.

I don’t think there are any domestic villains here.