By Pacific Coast Business Times Staff Sunday, May 10th, 2009

Haas Automation’s 400 laid-off workers are a testament to a financial laboratory experiment gone terribly wrong.

Until last fall, the Oxnard-based machine tool company was coping with the recession, pursuing a strategy of diversifying its customer base and building relationships with foreign companies who were opening up plants in the U.S.

But as Emily Rancer writes in the article on this page, the locking up of the global financial system in mid-September brought dramatic changes to Haas and its game plan.

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