It is proof that in a free market economy, you are often dealing with a series of dominoes, not isolated islands of economic activity.
All of those things you mention are directly related, and come back to the housing credit crunch which initially started all this stuff. Car dealerships are closing because they can't get the short term debt covenants to allow them to have stock.. The banks fail because without money to lend, they end up short of income. Layoffs come when you have less clients (because the car dealers and the banks are closing), end so on.
The injection of liquidity that the US government is looking at is there to put enough money into the system to buy up stale loans, to blow out the plaque from the financial arteries of the US system, and hopefully get people back on the correct side of the cycle.
As a side note, if you can actually get financing, it is getting to be a good time to invest in real estate, if you can afford to hold it for 5 - 10 years.
