Like Thomas Friedman talked about in "The World is Flat" now that Taiwan, China, India, Mexico, etc are getting larger middle classes, labor rates are going up. A big result of this, in the US, is that we will see companies that get products manufactured in those countries go through a lot of shifts in what they offer due to the cost of production. Not to say that any of the changes are predictible, but only that we will see a lot of changes in what they can and cannot offer for the prices we are used to. Lugged steel is only a bit more difficult to make, but at 100 dollars per hour (the skilled labor average rate in California, soon to be that in many of the before mentioned countries), if that lugged steel frame takes five hours more to make, we can expect to see probably a 200 per hour increase in retail price.