The writing of this book culminated in 2008, just as the global automotive industry was hit by the world financial crisis and a global recession. The automotive industry reigned as a leading global industry during the twentieth century – an especially remarkable phenomenon. The fall of the US Big Three, which had led the global reorganization of the industry until ten years ago, is alarming. GM and Chrysler both received public-funds assistance from the government. However, many people doubted the effectiveness of such an immense injection of about 3 trillion yen from public funds.

The causes of the downfall of the Big Three are described in Chapter 7 of this book and were anticipated at the time of writing. However, to summarize simply and without fear of repetition, they are as follows.

The first factor is that the Big Three devoted themselves to short-term profits, finance, and M&A and forgot the origins of manufacturing. This tendency was strong in GM, and the profit structure depended on financial income (consumer finance earnings + sub-prime loans, various financial risk hedging), which rode on the wave of global expansion of credit, which was raised by the sales financing subsidiary of GMAC. Although they are automotive companies, they did not earn their profits from cars but from earnings made through finance, and the stock that was raised.