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Podcast: Notes on the Week Ahead
Episode: The Outlook for Autos
Description: When I first arrived in America, America seemed to be all about cars.
It was the early 1980s, and I had come over from Ireland to do a Ph.D. in economics at Michigan State University. The campus was strewn with the hand-me-down vehicles of the student body – great gas-guzzling behemoths rendered hopelessly uncompetitive by the soaring gas prices of the 1970s and fighting a losing battle against Japanese imports. Still, the domestic auto industry was crucial to the U.S. and particularly Michigan, and rising sales numbers, released every 10-days, were monitored as the hopeful early sh...