Contrast these performances with those of former darlings of finance and tech. Insurance powerhouse American International Group Inc. swung from an $8-billion profit five years ago to an almost $8-billion loss last quarter. Chip maker Intel Corp., although still in the black, has seen its profit slide.
And the high-tech sector is experiencing the kind of consolidations -- and job reductions -- typical of a maturing industry, rather than a booming upstart.
Oracle Corp. has gobbled up PeopleSoft Inc., Siebel Systems Inc. and BEA Systems Inc., for instance, while Hewlett-Packard Co. agreed to acquire Electronic Data Systems Corp. for a whopping $13.9 billion this month and Microsoft is edging toward another attempt to gobble up Yahoo Inc.
"We'll see more consolidation, not less," HP Chief Executive Mark Hurd said last fall at a technology conference in San Francisco, predicting that a few companies would end up with the capability to offer a full array of hardware, software and services to customers in all segments of the market.
Unlikely comeback
Meantime, the comeback of codger industries is flipping some of Americans' most prominent notions about the nation's economic past and future on their heads.
Consider that when he ran the Federal Reserve in the 1990s, Alan Greenspan liked to imagine how the actual physical weight of what the United States produced was falling as the economy shifted away from heavy industry and into computers, microchips and the almost completely ethereal Internet.
But the country's economic weight loss, if it ever really occurred, is coming to an end, say old-economy watchers, and with it near-total reliance on the promise of high tech.
Most Americans may also have assumed that, along with high tech, the future of the U.S. economy -- and that of most other developed nations -- lay with the service sector. That's why, until recently, investors snapped up companies like global fast-food giant McDonald's Corp.
But as food prices have rocketed and agriculture has taken off, some investors have a new sweetheart: Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan, Canada, the world's largest supplier of a type of fertilizer that dates to the 14th century and is in increasing demand by farmers. Today, the little-known firm is valued by the stock market at almost $64 billion, nearly as much as McDonald's.
Similarly, it's been widely assumed that U.S. costs would always be much higher than those of the developing world. But what do you find today?
