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Business Matters: General Motors Hit by $900m Fine

General Motors Hit by $900m Fine

18/09/2015 GMT

BBC World Service - Business Matters, General Motors Hit by $900m Fine

GM will pay out at least $900m in a settlement over faulty ignitions.

GM will pay out at least $900m in a settlement over faulty ignitions. Plus, the US Federal Reserve holds its main interest rate at rock bottom.

The United States' biggest car-maker General Motors is to pay out at least $900m in a settlement over faulty ignitions. At least 124 people have died as a result of the deadly safety defect which the company has been charged with concealing. We hear from the birth mother of one of the victims, who died when her car crashed into a tree in 2005. 

The US Federal Reserve is keeping its main interest rate at rock bottom after much anticipation that the central bank would lift rates from zero for the first time in seven years.  But despite a firm US economic recovery, troubles elsewhere in the world were enough to keep the Fed edging on the side of caution. Joseph Gagnon, former Associate Director of Monetary Affairs at the Federal Reserve gives us his reaction. 

Hundreds of forest fires are burning across Indonesia, sending thick black smoke into the atmosphere and creating health hazards for millions of Indonesians. Carried by the wind, the pollution has spread to neighbouring countries like Malaysia and Singapore.  It's an annual occurrence caused in the main by people illegally setting fire to vast tracts of land to clear it for palm oil and paper plantations. Schools and businesses are shut, flights have been cancelled and economic life in many regions has ground to a halt. This year it's worse than usual, according to monitors, including Dr Nigel Sizer, director of the Forest programme at the World Resources Institute in Washington DC.

And Simon Jack is at a Boeing assembly plant – the largest building on earth - to see how the world’s most advanced jumbo jets are made. All this and more discussed with our two guests from either side of the Pacific - economist Justin Wolfers in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Tony Nash, chief economist at Complete Intelligence in Singapore.

(Picture: GM Headquaters, Detroit, MI. Credit: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)

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