I think there's going to be a lot of "re-tooling" for many industries: auto, mining, finance, road and home builders, manufacturing, etc. Many of the top-notch assemble work will be from newly-engineered plans for things we haven't built before and transportation of goods, retailing, consumption and even agriculture will change.
When speculative analyists expect "returns" to the same system we're crunching and chewing-up now, in a year or two, it means the return of the same but the same didn't work too good and won't be possible to bring back, as we see. I don't think things will ever be the same which doesn't mean things will be bad, just different but it'll take some growing pains to get there and tightening change to experience the collapse of what we've become.
Caterpiller will keep building bulldozers as large power projects, thought vastly different than our current ones will be built. People who punched the assembly clock in Detroit will probably be assembling and shipping turbine parts and alternators, truck drivers on the interstates might work for rail transport instead, and us tree folks will continue to trim and advise, fix or replace trees for all the above. Mortgage brokers and developers in cheap track real estate and investment bankers, as well as oil-based executives and their funded political favorites I'd like to see move to Guantanamo and never allowed due process. I don't know where all the big box store workers will go along with most of the cheap useless crap they push, but fast food will always be there.
On one hand it's horrible to see the stories from the little towns in Wisc. and Mich. where the luxury SUV's were made...plants closing this week and livelihoods crushed. On the other hand, the large SUV consumers have been brain dead for eight years now, the writing's been on the wall all along. Choices.
