Even businesses, which have been feeling the pinch of lower corporate profits, have benefited from lower interest rates; aggregate interest expense has remained fairly low relative to cash flow, and businesses have moved aggressively to bolster their financial stability by locking in more-assured, longer-term sources of funds.
Automakers in particular have been able to offer inexpensive financing to customers because their own funding costs have fallen. In many ways, the mechanism that propagated the weakness last year was quite traditional: A negative demand shock led to an unwanted accumulation of inventories and to an adjustment of production. That, in turn, idled workers and fed back into even weaker demand.