Sen. Lamar Alexander said the nation's current fiscal crisis could imperil the Volkswagen plant planned for Chattanooga's Enterprise South Industrial Park.
He said VW officials told him at the opening of the VW U.S. headquarters in Herndon, Va., that they were having trouble getting credit.
Sen. Alexander said that if VW cannot get financing for its cars, then that planned VW plant "doesn't have any jobs."
Here are his full remarks on the Senate floor:
"Mr. President, whatever the cost is, I do not want to see the cost of what will happen if we don't take action in the next few days. After you have lived a while, and after you have seen a few things, you begin to make some decisions based not just on the heart or the mind but on the gut. This is a gut decision to me, with a little bit of experience thrown in.
"When I was governor of Tennessee in the mid-1980s, I had the misfortune of presiding over a situation where we had 40 or 50 banks that failed. I stayed up all night with Paul Volcker and watched the Federal Reserve pull its credit for one of the banks in Knoxville. And that set off a chain of events which, if it had been a national chain of events, we would have seen 1,000 or 2,000 bank failures. That is what we had to deal with.
"That was a controlled, small event compared to what could happen if we do not take steps to avert a credit crisis in the United States. Last week, before Thursday night's events, I was at the Volkswagen headquarter's opening in Virginia. I spoke with the credit manager there for the part of the company that loans money to people who buy cars, and said to me that he and people similar to him, even companies that large, the largest European automobile maker, were finding it difficult to get dollars.
"What if General Motors Acceptance Corporation or Ford or Volkswagen or Nissan Credit cannot go into the market to get some money? Then they cannot loan me money to buy a Nissan or a Ford or a Saturn. If I can't buy a car, then the new Volkswagen plant or the Nissan plant or the General Motors plant that we are so excited about, doesn't have any jobs."