Region feels Charlotte's pain.

• Position: Charlotte

Charlotte lost more than its swagger and one of its two megabanks in the financial meltdown of 2008. It also shed lots of well-paying jobs. In Mecklenburg County alone, the number of financial-sector jobs fell 7% to 48,158 in 2009, according to the state Employment Security Commission. The average weekly wage in that sector dropped 10.8% to $1,715.61. "We lost, with the merger of Wachovia and Wells Fargo, 215 to 300 high-salaried individuals," says Tony Crumbley, vice president for research at the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce. "These are million-dollar-a-year jobs."

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Trouble at the banks had a ripple effect on professional firms that work with them, says Mike Walden, an economics professor at N.C. State University. All of that helped decrease the average weekly wage in Mecklenburg County 2.6% in 2009 to $997.36, while the statewide average rose slightly to $766.08. But Mecklenburg didn't suffer alone. Wages dropped in every county of the Charlotte region--the only region in the state so affected--and Mecklenburg wasn't even the worst of it. The average wage in neighboring Cabarrus County fell 3.3%. Another of Mecklenburg's neighbors, Union County, fell 2.6%.

In each county of the region, national and local circumstances contributed to the wage declines. Recession has dealt a big blow to manufacturing nationwide, and several counties suffered layoffs by big manufacturing employers. In Cabarrus, 1,100 jobs went up in smoke...