Word: detroiters
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...with the auto industry in Detroit, some of the credit-card industry's current problems have been years in the making. Over the past decade, U.S. households have been loading up on debt, with credit-card balances rising 75% since 1999. Yet families' real wages have increased only slightly - by just 4% during that same time period, according to Innovest. The savings rate has similarly declined relative to credit-card balances. Meanwhile, home equity, the biggest source of wealth for most families, has been drained by the mortgage crisis. "There isn't a cushion for anyone who has a bump...
...Even if just one of the Detroit Three - and GM is the most likely, as Ford is in better shape and Chrysler is much smaller - spiraled into a free-fall bankruptcy, the systemic effects, at least initially, would be huge. The whole industry would not be able to build cars in the U.S., because of the lack of parts. "Unlike the airlines or steel, when you look at the automobile industry and the fact that the whole supplier base is connected - to Ford, Chrysler, Toyota - it will have a ripple effect on the entire industry," says Nicole Y. Lamb-Hale...
...that's ultimately where Detroit ends up, is it worth the price to get there? Put another way, does GM deserve to be bailed out or left at the mercy of the market and almost certain death? "The University of Chicago training in me says the market should prevail," says Schrager. "But the Chrysler bailout was a success, and, gosh, I'd love to save it." That sentiment is not shared by everyone, and it goes to the heart of the central economic debate facing the country - between hard-nosed capitalists, who believe the market should decide, and public-policy...
...With reporting by Joseph R. Szczesny / Detroit...
Except for the soft hydraulic whir of expectations being raised, the first week of the Obama transition was a quiet one. Indeed, the big news came from neither Chicago nor Washington but from Detroit and Beijing. In Detroit, General Motors - the stupendously clueless automaker - begged for a bailout lest it go bankrupt, thereby raising the question: If our resources are limited, why should we invest in the failed corporate past rather than in the technologies of the future? The obvious answer was to protect jobs. But how long would those jobs last without a significant overhaul of the company...