No house, no car

摘要

WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN THE PIPER comes calling and knocks your bread and butter off the table on his way past? You find some more bread and a new way to butter it. That's the task that Detroit's Big Three automakers have before them as they try to choke down two bitter pills in the first half of 2008. The first pill is an overall downturn in the economy. Recession is popularly defined as two consecutive quarters of decreasing GDP. However, the National Bureau of Economic Research defines a recession as the time between the most recent peak of the economy's business activity and the point at which it bottoms out. However it's defined, the consensus is that the United States is in one, even though the GDP statistics don't yet bear that out.