A bail-out that passed

摘要

Detroit seems to be where Wall Street meets Main Street. Tight credit is reckoned to have cost the American carmakers 40,000 sales in August, worth about $1 billion in revenue. The impact has been felt most by America's Big Three-General Motors, Ford and Chrysler-which have suffered this year as consumers shunned gas-guzzlers in favour of the smaller cars mostly made by Japanese firms in American factories. Overall light-vehicle sales hit a 15-year low in September, with a fall of 27% compared with a year earlier. The problem is finance. "We have plenty of customers-what we don't have is financing available to meet their needs," Mike Jackson, chief executive of AutoNation, a leading car-dealer chain, told cnbc this week. He reckons that tighter credit and limits on finance for leases have cost his firm a fifth of its sales this year.