Toyota posting loss of $1.7 Billion for the year.

With the assholes in Congress bitching that the Big Three Automakers are retards in how they do business, it should be noted that Toyota is also posting a huge loss for the fiscal year...their first in 70 years of making vehicles. From the NYT link:

Analysts said Toyota’s downward revision, its second in two months, showed that the worst financial crisis since the Depression was threatening not just the Big Three but also even relatively healthy automakers in Japan, South Korea and Europe. Many other companies will also soon be reporting losses.

Worse, analysts said that they expected next year to be even more painful, amid forecasts that the global economy would continue to slide until at least the summer. This could cause a significant shakeout, driving smaller and weaker companies into the arms of a smaller number of bigger, richer players.

“It is just a matter of time before all major automakers are losing money,” an auto analyst in Tokyo for Credit Suisse Securities, Koji Endo, said. “And things will just get worse next year, when companies start losing money for the second consecutive year.”

Toyota, which just a few months ago seemed unstoppable after eight years of record profits, said it suffered from plunging vehicle sales not only in North America but also in once-promising markets like India and China, which many had hoped would prove immune to the United States malaise. Toyota’s group includes the automaker Daihatsu and the truck builder Hino.

Unlike the Big Three here in America, Toyota has plenty of cash on hand to weather the hard times...$18 Billion to be exact. But the U.S is their biggest market..and it sucks for Toyota just as it sucks for the Big Three:

In November, Toyota’s sales dropped 33.9 percent and Honda Motor’s 31.6 percent, both faring slightly better than G.M., which had a 41 percent decline.

Still, it sucks to be a purveyor of anything expensive..regardless of which country does the manufacturing.