In 1989, analysts forecast that North America alone was going to have excess auto-production capacity of 2.5 million cars in 1991, and thanks to the recession, overcapacity that year was actually closer to 4.5 million. Global overcapacity was the bugbear that U.S. auto executives cited whenever they were asked about the state of the industry. By 1994, after three successive years of market-share growth and sizable profits (at least for Ford and Chrysler), Ford's Alex Trotman was sending up caution signals about an inevitable downturn due to oversupply, and analysts were suggesting that Europe and Asia together already had the ability to build 10 million more cars in a year than they could sell. (That doesn't mean that the cars were actually being built, of course, just that they could be.) And even in 1994, South Korea and Mexico were already being tabbed as the villains of overinvestment.