Senator McCaskill is optimistic that Congress will approve a 15-billion dollar loan bill for the domestic auto industry. She says the Big Three are not having problems because they’ve lost market share. She says the domestic market share has been steady in the last 18 months of competition with foreign companies. But what has changed, she says, is the numbers of cars sold. She says the domestic automakers usually look to sell about seventeen million cars a year. But this year the number is likely to be closer to ten million because of job uncertainty in the consuming public and because of difficulty in obtaining credit.
She thinks the companies have done an "admirable job" of reducing fixed costs. Shays all three are making good faith efforts to retool and downsize their companies and take other steps to remain competitive.
She’s hoping the bridge loans will help them get through the current "rough patch," and she hopes a new stimulus package will be enacted early next year by the new Congress that will generate more purchasing.