Bad News for Auto Industry

Year-end auto clear-out sales could start as early as this week, a reaction to the worst October sales, per-capita, since World War II.

• General Motors October sales fell 45 percent compared with October 2007.
• Chrysler was down about 35 percent
• Mercedes-Benz posted a 34.3 percent sales decline
• Nissan, sales were down 33.6 percent
• Hyundai's October sales fell 31.1 percent
• Ford 30 percent
• Honda 25 percent
• Toyota 23 percent

Analysts had expected a massive drop in sales with almost every economic indicator working against auto companies. Consumer confidence has fallen to record lows, and banks and finance companies are either cutting the amount they will loan or lending only to consumers with great credit.

Projections from GM and Ford have October sales at their worst level since the 1970s. And when you take into account population growth, you have to go back to just after World War II, when companies were shifting back to car production from tanks and Jeeps, to find numbers this bad, DiGiovanni said.

In response, companies are doing the only thing they can do: cutting prices. GM will start its year-end sales event this week instead of waiting until after Thanksgiving as it typically does. Chrysler extended some discounts it began offering last month, and LaNeve said he expects Toyota and Nissan to continue their marketing and incentive offers.

At Ford, GM and Chrysler, sales have been down all year, but the reasons for the drops have changed. During the first few months of the year, high gas prices were pushing consumers out of trucks and sport utility vehicles into cars and crossovers. Toyota and Honda gained in those months because they had more of the small cars people wanted to buy.

But as the year continued, the pain spread. Jittery banks and finance companies began to tighten credit standards, making it harder for customers without superior credit to get loans.

General Motors Acceptance Corp., a lender co-owned by GM and private capital company Cerberus, stopped writing loans to consumers with credit scores lower than 700. Nationwide, the average credit score is about 692, according to Experian, one of the three major national credit bureaus.

In the past several weeks, analysts said consumers getting rejected for credit are the least of the industry's problems. More problematic is the fact that people just aren't shopping for cars.

Anxiety and Depression Linked to Overtime Work

People who work overtime are more likely to be anxious and depressed - and the more they work, the higher the risk, according to a study conducted by researchers from the University of Bergen, Norway, and published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, official publication of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

The researchers assessed anxiety and depression by means of a standardized questionnaire in 10,350 Norwegian women and men who were taking part in a larger study. Nine thousand of the participants were working 40 hours a week or less, while 1,350 were working between 41 and 100 hours per week.

Among those who worked 40 hours a week or fewer, women averaged a 7 percent "possible" depression score, while men averaged 9 percent. In overtime workers, however, this percentage went up to 11 percent in women and 12.5 percent in men. Those who worked between 49 and 100 hours per week were the most likely to experience anxiety and depression.

The researchers also found that those with lower incomes and those working in less skilled positions tended to be more anxious and depressed. At the same time, those working the most overtime also tended to have a lower level of education and to be in less-skilled positions involving manual labor or shift work. As such, the researchers were unable to tell to what extent the overtime actually causes the anxiety and depression, to what extent it is associated with another cause (such as low-income physical labor), or to what extent anxiety and depression are influenced by a more complex interaction of several of these factors.

Prior research has shown that those who work overtime are more likely to be stressed and fatigued, and also to become sick or injured. Based in part on such studies, the European Union allows workers to refuse to work more than 48 hours per week.