The giant container ships that have come to all but define globalization can be as long as three-and-a-half soccer fields (and roughly that long in terms of football pitches if you’re reading this outside the United States).

The latest and greatest of them come with all sorts of new technology for navigation, managing their load and cutting down on fuel costs.

That got us thinking at this year’s Reuters Manufacturing Summit: what kind of technology are shipping companies putting in to repel pirates, who in some widely publicized cases have taken over ships in the seas off Somalia or in the Straits of Malacca, near Indonesia and Malaysia.

We posed the piracy question to Seaspan CEO Gerry Wang. The bottom line: if you’re Captain Hook or Jack Sparrow, don’t try to steal one of these babies.

You’ll be sorry.

Wang was one of the featured speakers at the annual Reuters Manufacturing Summit, which runs through Thursday in our Chicago offices.

The credit crunch that’s curtailing access to funding for many companies may lead to consolidation among companies that own and operate shipping lines.

Container ships are not cheap, and they take years to build, so investors who order one have to do so well ahead of time. Some have overextended themselves, and may now be ripe takeover candidates.

Seaspan, a company that owns and leases container ships, sees many opportunities for acquisitions in coming months, as smaller operators run into financial problems, its Chief Executive Gerry Wang told the Reuters Manufacturing Summit in Chicago.

Want to get a clear sense of where the U.S. and world economies are headed?

A good place to start may be by asking the CEO of the world’s biggest trucking company, since truckers act as a leading indicator of economic activity.

Things aren’t looking so good right now, YRC Worldwide’s Chief Executive Bill Zollars told the Reuters Manufacturing Summit. YRC, with 900,000 customers worldwide, 66,000 employees in 80 countries, ships just about anything that will fit on a truck, and has been struggling for the last six months, Zollars told the Summit.

Housing and autos are not the only areas of weakness. Conditions are not deteriorating further, but they are “comprehensive,” he said … and they may be spreading to other parts of the world.

Zollars was one of the featured speakers at ths year’s summit, held in Reuters Chicago offices. The next Reuters summit will be the Mining and Steel Summit, held in New York, London and Sydney, Australia.

A power outage that affected millions of electricity customers in Florida on Tuesday may be a sign of things to come.

U.S. utilities have underinvested in capacity in recent years, and densely populated areas where demand is high may be facing more future blackouts as a result — that’s according to the North American CEO of Swiss/Swedish engineering group ABB.

Enrique Santacana told the Reuters Manufacturing Summit the U.S. needs “tens of billions” of dollars in investment in new sources of energy, more efficient power networks and conservation — all of which play to ABB’s strength as a global provider of energy infrastructure.

Reuters asked Santacana what the U.S. energy industry — and its regulators — have learned from the power blackout that hit the Northeast and Midwest of the United States and parts of Canada on August 14, 2003, and whether a repeat of that event was likely.

FPL Group Inc, the main electricity provider in South Florida, is an ABB customer.

Turns out, they can! 

Global industrial companies have talked for years about the soaring demand in China for energy, infrastructure, machinery, know-how — you name it. But who knew car crashes could be good for business?

Well, according to Ingersoll-Rand CEO Herb Henkel, Chinese drivers’ poor safety record helps illustrate how China’s economy is becoming more consumer driven.

Chinese consumers are buying millions of new cars each year, and not all of those buyers are experienced drivers. In fact, 40 percent of all cars were involved in car accidents last year, Henkel told the Reuters Manufacturing Summit on Monday.

Body shops to fix all those smashed cars are springing up all over.

“You can imagine the opportunity that presents for air tools,” Henkel told the Summit. “For us, the activity level continues to be very robust (in China), focusing now on the consumer-driven in-country opportunities, rather than a lot of manufacturing being done for export. I think that’s the next stage they’ve gotten themselves to.”

For Democrats vying for the U.S. Presidency, the housing crisis offers a chance to put forward a compelling message about the failures of the Bush Administration to regulate the banking and mortgage industry, says a Democratic delegate to the convention, who’s also the Attorney General of Ohio.

Marc Dann told the Reuters Housing Summit he is going after mortgage lenders and banks who structured and resold loans for what he calls “fraud” perpetrated against both investors and home buyers.

He said the eventual Democratic nominee — whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama — can tap into voter anger about the housing crisis, and could lay much of the blame at the Republicans’ feet.

One problem in trying to stem the tide of home foreclosures is simply that too few borrowers and lenders are talking to each other to work out new terms.

The Hope Now Alliance, a coalition of nationwide lenders, investors, counselors and other mortgage market participants, counts improving communication as one of its stated goals.

Hope Now’s executive director Faith Schwartz told the Reuters Housing Summit why some borrowers are reluctant to talk to their lender.

  The current housing crisis presents challenges for U.S. mayors that few elected officials have ever faced before. Rising foreclosures destabilize neighborhoods and families and can lead to higher crime, Douglas Palmer, Mayor of Trenton, New Jersey, told the Reuters Housing Summit on Tuesday.

Mayor Palmer, who has served Trenton since 1990, blamed “predatory lending” during the housing boom for an upturn in foreclosures. He talked about the challenges a city mayor faces when local foreclosures rise.

The worst housing market in the United States right now is in Sacramento, California, according to Radar Logic’s director of research Jonathan Miller, whose analytics business produces a daily “spot” price for residential real estate in major U.S. metropolitan areas, or MSAs.

Among the housing markets that are holding up the best are Milwaukee and Seattle, Miller told the Reuters Housing Summit — but prices increases in Seattle may not last much longer.

Ratings agencies sued over their role in the the subprime mortgage crisis won’t be able to hide behind free speech protections guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, because they played an active role in structuring loan assets, attorney Salvatore Graziano told the Reuters Housing Sumit on Tuesday.