DETROIT, MI. – At the end of a long day yesterday I spent a sobering 15 minutes with Fritz Henderson, president and chief operating officer of General Motors Corp.

Henderson is the No. 2 executive at GM, an accountant by training, a former college baseball pitcher, a really, really competitive guy and one of the smarter people I've come across in 23 years of covering the auto industry.

Yesterday he was not much fun. He certainly was not in much of a mood to celebrate GM's 100th anniversary.

I left our short meeting thinking that if anyone doubts the seriousness of the situation facing GM and the other Detroit auto makers, if anyone questions the widespread and deep difficulties facing the financial sector in the United States – and by extension the rest of the world – they should spend 15 minutes with Henderson.

“The events of the last two weeks have been stunning,” he said, referring to among other things the failure of Lehman Brothers and the takeover of Merrill Lynch. He also pointed out that AIG, which as recently as last year was a AAA credit risk, is in deep, deep trouble. And on and on and on.

“The last two Sundays made me more nervous than I have been in a long, long time,” he said, referring to the unfolding events that have had the U.S. Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve intervene in the financial markets with hundreds of billions of taxpayer money.

For GM, and other auto makers, of course, a credit crunch means there are fewer people able to borrow the money to buy new cars. The collapse of the housing market in the U.S. also hits cars sales. Many Americans had been using home loans to finance their new cars, but no longer. Add in the triple whammy of a dramatic spike in fuel prices and you've got a perfect storm for GM.

Call it a Hurricane Ike for GM and many, many other car companies. And it's not just GM we are talking about, either. Even Toyota, the world's most profitable car company, is finding it a tough slog to turn a buck in the U.S.

I've interviewed Henderson many times and I have always found him to be a straight shooter. He just does not mince words. For instance, when I asked him about GM's balance sheet, he simply said “it's weak.”

You'll read more about this in next week's Globe Auto. For now, our politicians in Canada and the U.S. simply must get serious about the economic issues -- and why on earth are we not having a vigorous debate about energy policy, about fuel prices, about the future of the auto industry, the finance industry and so many other important matters?

Instead, most of the discussion and debate is about trivialities. And when it's not that, then the mudslinging gets going. I know it's worse in the U.S. – the three-day “lipstick on a pig” debate was embarrassing, especially for members of the news media who obsessed over it – but we're not much better in Canada.

These pols should spend 15 minutes in Fritz Henderson's shoes. If that doesn't get them walking and talking differently, then I don't know what will.