Volvo is a Chinese-owned Swedish company making cars in the U.S. When it decided to set up a plant in South Carolina to build cars to ship around the world, it was following a long tradition.

With its port, Charleston, S.C., has been a shipping hub for centuries. And the state has been home to international manufacturers for decades — BMW, Michelin and Bosch are among the many global firms with footholds there.

But before the plant opened last year, President Trump transformed America’s approach to trade policy.

Trump’s trade war with China has stretched for more than a year, and trade tensions remain high with Europe as well. Tariffs on steel and aluminum are pinching auto suppliers in the U.S., who face higher costs for raw materials to make parts. Meanwhile, tariffs on imported parts can cut into the budgets of automakers, who rely on thousands of different components from around the world to build each vehicle.

Volvo, owned by the Chinese firm Geely, intended to export many cars from the plant near Charleston to China, but the tit-for-tat tariffs between Beijing and Washington threw a wrench into those finely tuned plans. U.S.-made Volvos aren’t being sent to China after all.

“It’s kind of a disappointment, but we’re going to work through it,” says Trey Yonce, a supervisor at the plant, as he watches line workers assemble cars. “It wasn’t what we wanted to hear.”

But as Yonce notes, Volvo is adapting, not cutting back.

Analysts compare imposing tariffs to squeezing on a balloon. Put pressure in one spot and the global economy will shift to work around it.

Volvo’s new $1.1 billion plant in Ridgeville, S.C., employs 1,500 people. It’s currently running at a fraction of its capacity, manufacturing the S60, a luxury sedan. But Volvo has certainly not stopped production because of tariffs. In fact, the company is still planning to add an SUV to the plant in the next few years.

And half the cars made in the facility are still being exported — just not to China. A batch recently went to Belgium, for distribution across Europe. In coming months, Volvo says, it will ship cars to countries in the Middle East, Africa, Oceania and the Asia Pacific region — excluding China, of course.

The plant was designed to be flexible, handling gas engines, hybrids and eventually electric vehicles on the same line. Volvo has had to be flexible about where it builds cars and for which markets, too.

“We need to be able to change our manufacturing capabilities very fast,” says Anders Gustafsson, Volvo Cars’ vice president for the Americas and the CEO of Volvo Car USA. “We are fast, but it’s not easy.”

But he takes the long view.

“To run a plant or run a company, it’s a long-term decision,” Gustafsson says. “So you lose and you win.”

Across the entire industry, automakers are stuck waiting to see how the trade conflicts will pan out, says labor and manufacturing expert Kristin Dziczek of the Center for Automotive Research.

“Essential investments are getting made,” she says. “Strategic investments are waiting to find out what the rules of the game [are] going to be.”

And it’s not just the car industry grappling with the unpredictable nature of these trade talks.

“I think that every industry has got some some skin in the game or some things that get messed up when trade becomes uncertain,” she says.

Jim Newsome, the CEO of the South Carolina Ports Authority, notes that his state depends heavily on global trade. “We ought to be trying to lower tariffs, not raise tariffs,” he says. “The global automotive industry could benefit from zero tariffs.”

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Thousands of Hollywood writers have been told by the Writers Guild of America to fire their agents — a drastic move that could impinge the production of new TV shows and films.

The abrupt directive on Friday followed a breakdown in negotiations over proposed changes to the agreement that has guided the basic business relationship between writers and agents for the past 43 years.

With talks stalled ahead of a midnight deadline, the WGA sent its 13,000 writers an email with instructions to notify their agents in writing that they cannot represent them until signing a new code of conduct.

“We know that, together, we are about to enter uncharted waters,” the message stated. “Life that deviates from the current system might be various degrees of disorienting. But it has become clear that a big change is necessary.”

It was a bold move for a group accustomed to writing its own scripts. “I guess the idea of taking on our agents is something people never thought we would do,” said David Goodman, the president of the Writers Guild of America West, in an interview with NPR.

“Studios and networks still need writers to do the work so until agents figure out that they need us more than we need them, we will carry this out,” said Goodman.

At the center of the conflict is a complaint among writers that their agents are not just drastically out-earning them, but preventing them from receiving better pay. The dispute threatens to hinder production at a time when the major broadcast networks are typically staffing up for their fall lineups. It could also lead to job losses in the industry.

“This whole fight is really about the fact that in a period of unprecedented profits and growth of our business … writers themselves are actually earning less,” said Goodman.

A main point of contention involves what are known as packaging fees, the money that agents get from a studio when they provide a roster of talent for a film or TV project. Traditionally, agents would earn a 10 percent commission for the work their clients receive from a studio. But with packaging fees, they are compensated by the studios directly. “They are not incentivized to increase the income of those writers,” Goodman said.

Writers are also protesting a shift in the business model in recent years at some of Hollywood’s largest talent agencies. Agents have increasingly entered the film and TV businesses as producers, and writers contend that such a dual-hat arrangement represents a conflict of interest.

Goodman said that in order to break the impasse, the industry needs to return “to the traditional agent-writer relationship” where an agent takes 10 percent of a writer’s income.

On Saturday, some writers posted images of the letters they had signed and sent to their agents, showing solidarity if not total support.

“I have an amazing agency that represents me,” screenwriter, actor and comedian Patton Oswalt said on Twitter. “But I have an even better guild which stands for me.”

“Dammit,” wrote David Simon, a Baltimore-based author and television writer best known for The Wire. “Just realized that the [agency agreement] midnight deadline is PST. So I have to stay up another three hours and one minute to send a pic of my naked a** to [the Creative Artists Agency].”

The Association of Talent Agents, which represents the agencies, has promised more transparency when agencies are involved in the production of a film or TV show. The association committed to reopening talks on the issue after two years if the Writers Guild determines that members aren’t benefiting.

The association also offered concessions leading up to Friday’s breakdown, including a chance to share 80 percent of “a percentage” of their profits when packaging fees for a television series are involved.

The guild said that based on the offer they received from agents, that “percentage” amounted to 0.8 percent of the money agents make from packaging fees.

ATA also said agencies would spend $6 million over six years to foster a more inclusive environment and insisted they “are, and always have been, on the side of the writer.”

In a statement, Karen Stuart, the executive director of the ATA, said Friday’s failure “was driven by the Guild’s predetermined course for chaos.” She said it would ultimately harm artists.

“The WGA is mandating a ‘Code of Conduct’ that will hurt all artists, delivering an especially painful blow to mid-level and emerging writers, while dictating how agencies of all sizes should function.”

Goodman said writers are already hurt. He called the proposal “a ridiculous offer given the fact that the writers are the reason that any television show succeeds.”

Until the impasse is solved, members of the guild have told writers they could turn to managers or lawyers to handle their business affairs.

Lawyers for the ATA threatened to sue the guild, contending that the union was violating California and New York licensing laws. As part of its argument, it said in a letter that the union “cannot ‘delegate’ authority it does not have.”

Friday’s breakdown in negotiations marked just the latest chapter in the Writers Guild’s longstanding aversion to packaging fees. Goodman said the union sought reforms as far back as the 1970s.

“People are saying this is an unprecedented move, but it isn’t in the sense that 43 years ago we tried to get rid of packaging and we failed and now it’s gotten much worse,” Goodman said.

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Technology theft and other unfair business practices originating from China are costing the American economy more than $57 billion a year, White House officials believe, and they expect that figure to grow.

Yet an investigation by NPR and the PBS television show Frontline into why three successive administrations failed to stop cyberhacking from China found an unlikely obstacle for the government — the victims themselves.

In dozens of interviews with U.S. government and business representatives, officials involved in commerce with China said hacking and theft were an open secret for almost two decades, allowed to quietly continue because U.S. companies had too much money at stake to make waves.

Wendy Cutler, who was a veteran negotiator at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, says it wasn’t just that U.S. businesses were hesitant to come forward in specific cases. She says businesses didn’t want the trade office to take “any strong action.”

“We are not as effective if we don’t have the U.S. business community supporting us,” she says. “Looking back on it, in retrospect, I think we probably should have been more active and more responsive. We kind of lost the big picture of what was really happening.”

None of the dozens of companies or organizations that NPR reached out to that have been victims of theft or corporate espionage originating from China would go on the record.

And for its part, the Chinese government officially denied to NPR and Frontline that it has been involved in such practices.

But that’s not what former U.S. Attorney David Hickton found. When he took over in the Western District of Pennsylvania in 2010, he says, he was inundated with calls from companies saying they suspected China might be inside their computer systems.

“I literally received an avalanche of concern and complaints from companies and organizations who said, ‘We are losing our technology — drip, drip, drip,’ ” he says.

Hickton opened an investigation and quickly set his sights on a special unit of the Chinese military — a secretive group known as Unit 61398. Investigators were able to watch as the unit’s officers, sitting in an office building in Shanghai, broke into the computer systems of American companies at night, stopped for an hour break at China’s lunchtime and then continued in the Chinese afternoon.

“They were really using a large rake — think of a rake [like] you rake leaves in the fall,” he says. “They were taking everything … personal information, strategic plans, organizational charts. Then they just figured out later how they were going to use it.”

But when Hickton went to the companies, eager for them to become plaintiffs, he ran into a problem. None of the companies wanted any part of it. Hickton says they had too much money on the line in China.

“What we were tone-deaf to is [that] we seemed to think we could just walk in and wave the flag of the USA,” Hickton says, “and it just didn’t work.”

Even today, five years later, Hickton still won’t name most of the companies involved — and they have never come forward.

Eventually he was able to convince five largely local companies and the steelworkers union to come forward, mostly, he says, because he grew up in Pittsburgh and went to school with a lot of the managers.

“I knew these people,” Hickton says. “They trusted me. … We couldn’t ask them to be patriotic at the expense of engendering a shareholder case.”

But, he says, he could have included hundreds — or even thousands — more.

“We’ve made a terrible mistake by being so secretive about our cyberwork,” he says. “We have not fairly told the people we represent what the threats are.”

Government and business leaders interviewed by NPR and Frontline said individual companies were making millions of dollars in China over the past decade and a half and didn’t want to hurt short-term profits by coming forward. They demanded secrecy, even in the face of outright theft.

But now the impact of that secrecy is coming to light, they say. Companies are facing hundreds of millions of dollars in future losses from the theft, and U.S. officials say they are years behind trying to tackle the problem.

Michael Wessel, commissioner on the U.S. government’s U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, says it wasn’t supposed to be this way. U.S. officials had high hopes when China officially joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

“There was a honeymoon period in the first six or seven years, a desire to try [to] make things work,” Wessel says.

But, he says, starting around 2006, businesses began coming to him saying that China had stolen their designs or ideas or had pressured them into partnerships and taken their technology.

Just like with Hickton, Wessel says, they wouldn’t come forward publicly.

“The business community wanted the administration to come in hard without anyone’s fingerprints being on the reasoning behind it,” he says. “They wanted the profits, but they also didn’t want the possible retribution.”

Wessel says that was never going to work. While nothing in the original trade agreements specifically mentions cybertheft, the U.S. could have brought criminal cases forward, enacted sanctions or opened investigations under rules set up by the World Trade Organization — if a company would let it.

Court cases and documents from recent years offer a clue into what experts believe has really been going on. The Chinese government has been accused of stealing everything from vacuum cleaner designs to solar panel technology to the blueprints of Boeing’s C-17 aircraft.

Hackers from China, often with ties to the government, have been accused of breaking into gas companies, steel companies and chemical companies. Not long ago, Chinese government companies were indicted for stealing the secret chemical makeup of the color white from DuPont. China developed its J-20 fighter plane, a plane similar to Lockheed Martin’s F-22 Raptor, shortly after a Chinese national was indicted for stealing technical data from Lockheed Martin, including the plans for the Raptor.

Chinese hacking made occasional headlines, but none really grabbed Americans’ attention. There was one exception.

In 2010, Google went public in announcing that it had been hacked by the Chinese government. Thirty-four other American companies that were also part of the hack stayed silent. Most have kept it a secret to this day.

NPR tracked down 11 of the total 35 companies. All of them either did not respond to NPR’s request or declined to comment.

A former top Google official who was closely involved in managing the hack told NPR that Google was “infuriated” that no other company would come forward, leaving Google to challenge China alone.

“[We] wanted to out all of the companies by name,” said the official, who spoke on the condition their name not be used because they did not have permission from Google to speak about the incident. “One of the companies we called, said ‘Oh, yeah, we’ve been tracking this for months.’ It was unbelievable. The legal department talked us out of it.”

“We felt like we stood up and did the right thing,” the former official said. “It felt like Helm’s Deep, the battle from The Lord of the Rings in which you’re impossibly surrounded and severely outnumbered.”

James McGregor, a former chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, who was there at the time, says the companies kept even business organizations like his from speaking out.

“What they should have done is held a press conference and say, ‘We 35 businesses have been hacked,’ and you would have put it right back on China,” says McGregor. “Instead, they just all hid under a rock and pretended it didn’t happen.”

McGregor says their silence left little room for punishment, and worse, he says, it hid the extent of the problem.

Across the ocean, cybersleuth Dmitri Alperovitch was sitting at his desk at a security company in Atlanta when Google called looking for backup. He says when he took a look, he was stunned.

“I knew pretty much right away this is something very different,” says Alperovitch, who is co-founder of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. “For the first time we were facing a nation-state and intelligence service that was breaking into companies — not governments, not militaries, but private sector organizations.”

But, he says, U.S. government officials were nowhere to be seen.

“They did not even publicly concur with the attributions that Google had made at the time,” he says.

Obama administration officials say they did not turn a blind eye to the Google hack or cybertheft from China.

The administration was struggling with other important priorities, such as North Korea, Iran, the economy and climate change, says Evan Medeiros, Obama’s top China specialist and then a staffer at the National Security Council.

“Direct confrontation with China does not usually result in lasting solutions,” Medeiros says, noting that President Obama secured an agreement with Chinese President Xi Jinping to halt the attacks and put together a regional trade agreement — the Trans-Pacific Partnership — to add pressure.

But neither measure lasted.

“Hindsight is always 20/20,” he says. “I wish that we had spent more time … finding creative ways to punish them for creating a nonlevel playing field.”

Without those punishments, the attacks continued.

In the year after the Google hack, Alperovitch uncovered two more serious intrusions that, he says, involved thousands of American companies.

In the fall of 2011, he went to the White House to warn officials about what he had found. He sat down in the Situation Room with a half-dozen top administration leaders.

“The most surprising thing to me was the lack of surprise,” Alperovitch says. “I got the distinct impression that none of this was news. When I pressed them on why they were not taking stronger action against China, their response was, ‘We have a multifaceted relationship with China.’ ”

Alperovitch says White House officials told him that some of the same companies that were being victimized by China also wanted to continue doing business in China.

“They didn’t want to take any action that would jeopardize that billions of dollars of trade we were doing at the time,” he says.

Ask McGregor, the American business representative, how companies can complain about China’s behavior to the U.S. government while simultaneously preventing the government from taking strong action, and his answer is blunt.

“Companies were afraid of China,” he says. “American business companies’ incentives are to make money.”

McGregor today advises dozens of American companies in China, and he says they are confronting a new reality. China is no longer an up-and-comer — it’s a true competitor and quickly closing in on America’s high-tech sector. McGregor says company leaders are beginning to ask whether years of theft and hacking have given China an edge that the United States will no longer be able to stay in front of.

And U.S. government officials are asking whether federal agencies will be able to catch up on enforcement.

Top government leaders told NPR that federal agencies are years behind where they could have been if the theft had been openly addressed.

Even at the Defense Department, as late as 2014, cybertheft from China was not one of the Pentagon’s top priorities.

“Our intelligence agencies were looking at the Middle East, at the Russians,” says Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding, a China expert who worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council.

He says he had never given the issue of Chinese cybertheft much thought. But then, in the fall of 2014, he loaded a confidential briefing into his computer. It was case after case in which the Chinese government had stolen the product designs from almost a dozen high-tech American companies, in a couple of cases almost putting them out of business.

“It immediately changed my conception, my view of the world,” he says. “I realized I did not know how the world worked.”

Spalding says he made it his mission to get the word out to other government agencies. But even in 2015, he says, he was met mostly with a shrug.

He says he went to the departments of Commerce and the Treasury, as well as the U.S. Trade Representative and the U.S. State Department.

“The two responses we got were, ‘Oh my gosh, this is really, really bad.’ And the second one is, ‘That’s not my job,'” Spalding says. “That was almost the universal answer we got every time we went to a senior leader. Bad problem but not my problem.”

Spalding, who retired from the Air Force last year, says in the final years under Obama and now under President Trump, agencies are finally starting to take some action. The Justice Department is bringing criminal cases, the trade representative’s office is investigating China’s dealings and both administrations have brought concerns to the Chinese directly.

But, Spalding says, it may have come 10 years too late.

“We all missed it,” he says. “We have to understand the problem and get to work on it.”

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Who says a dollar doesn’t go as far as it used to?

When it comes to dollar bills, a new report from the federal government says they’re lasting more than twice as long as they were at the beginning of the decade.

And that’s upending an old argument about replacing the dollar bill with a $1 coin.

Analysts have long argued the federal government could save money by making the switch because even though coins cost more to mint, they last much longer than paper money. In 2011, the Government Accountability Office estimated the savings at $5.5 billion over 30 years.

But a second look from the GAO flips that coin argument on its head. Analysts now say the government would lose between $611 million and $2.6 billion over 30 years by phasing out the dollar bill. The economics have shifted because dollar bills are lasting longer.

“When we last looked at this issue in 2011, the paper dollar was only lasting a little bit over three years,” said John Shumann, an assistant director at the GAO. “When we looked at this issue again this year, we found that the paper dollar is now lasting almost eight years long.”

Shumann said that’s partly because of changes in the way the Federal Reserve processes dollar bills. But it’s also a sign that in an increasingly cashless world, paper dollars aren’t getting around like they used to.

“They’re often showing less signs of wear and tear,” Shumann said.

As part of its research, the GAO surveyed lots of industries that might have a stake in the paper-versus-coin contest, and found most are not eagerly embracing the switch to $1 coins.

Even the Coin Laundry Association.

“You know, it’s right in our name,” said CEO Brian Wallace, whose group represents some 30,000 self-service laundries around the country.

Despite the name, only a handful of those businesses currently accept $1 coins. Meanwhile, alternative payment options have proliferated.

“You could still pay with a quarter,” Wallace said. “But you could also pay with a credit card or add value to a card. Or taking the Starbucks approach of just waving the phone at the washer and it starts.”

Other businesses long associated with coins have also moved on.

“Once upon a time, toll roads, along with transit systems and the post office itself were the largest coinage handlers in the country,” said Neil Gray, director of government affairs for the International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association.

Not anymore. Fewer than one in five toll-road users pay cash today.

“To the extent possible, we’ve had entire toll road systems eliminate cash completely,” Gray said.

Even slot machines have largely done away with coin slots.

(One exception is the gumball machine industry, which told the GAO it could offer higher-quality gum and toys if more people carried $1 coins.)

The new GAO report may discourage congressional efforts to phase out the dollar bill. In any case, $1 coins have proven stubbornly unpopular with the public. That’s why the Fed has more than a billion of the coins sitting unused, in storage.

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