So basically,
- Banks will repossess vehicles to try and minimise losses
- Banks will not be able to sell those repossessed vehicles, resulting in losses
- Banks may become insolvent as they are unable to liquidate the vehicles
- Government steps in to bail them out
New vehicle prices are not in line with their actual value, so banks are making loans that aren’t covered by the collateral. This is shit management by the banking industry. If it’s impossible to get an auto loan then vehicle prices will eventually fall as supply stacks up. Banks are feeding this cycle by being unrealistic in these loan assessments.
But… But price only go up?
The sky daddy book of economics says price only ever goes up and concentrated wealth is a good thing
- Government steps in to bail them out *with tax money taken from the people who couldn’t pay their car note in the first place
So either banks make money or banks take money.
The people who couldn’t pay their car note in the first place usually ain’t the type making a shit ton of money. They probably pay little taxes if any.
Well, yes and no. It’s grey like most things in life.
Banks and credit are a means to “grow the pie” by allowing us to factor in future value. Before banks and credit, the world was a zero sum game where one person only had because the other person had not.
They do serve a real purpose but are only valuable when properly managed.
Yeah that isn’t true. The world never ran on the mathusian nightmare. If it had everything would be gone by now. You see wild edible plants and wild edible animals. Also census numbers and tax revenues would have been stable. The people of the past had the same issues we had. They starved on fertile farm land, they had economic downturns, they had baby booms, farms would switch from high end cash products to cheap grains they could sustain themselves with and back again.
Banks aren’t doing us some favor by being the engine of economic growth. Every bank you see has become a corny capitalism abomination that makes most of its money lending money to people who don’t need it, government infusions, and fees. Even the things that you can point to like financing a home ignore that it is a disease that they helped cause and they are selling the cure to.
4 probably won’t happen. The mortgage bailouts were a bit of a special case, because the debt was rolled into securities and spread all over the place. To my knowledge there isn’t a secondary market for auto loans, so the scope is limited to individual banks.
What may happen is the FDIC guarantees all deposits like they did with silicon valley bank, which is less bad than a full on bailout.
Why wouldn’t they? You said it yourself, they will get bailed out. This is classic moral hazard. Once you remove risk of lose people will make decisions that are reckless.
They won’t have to worry about selling the cars, some used car dealer will take them off their hands gladly. What the banks and the financiers will have to worry about is how to bundle all of that bad debt into CDOs. There’s a movie about this I think.
No used car dealership is going to take a 2007 Chevy Cavalier for 35k and yet that loan was approved during COVID, and subsequently repo’d.
No dealer will ever unload that car without a huge loss.
It’s the banks problem to sort out. Until they sell the car to a dealer - they don’t lose much. It’s all ‘in the air’ on the books. They have a 35k loan and (in theory) a 35k car.
Toyota is selling a basic (no ABS brakes, no airbags, crank windows) pickup in the rest of the world for $10,000. They could probably sell a version with the optional safety equipment in the US for $15-20k. But they will not sell it here and mess up the $50-100k luxury pickup gravy train.
At least they aren’t doing what the big 3 do with their trucks. A mid range XLT F-150 will cost about the same as a fully decked out Tundra, and a fully decked out F-150 will set you back over $100K, but these were sold for $50-$75K just before the pandemic, so what changed? They just decided to charge more due to greed.
I look at it as fleecing the assholes who buy those fucking things for vanity. Keep it up Ford and GM. Make them go fucking broke.
They don’t sell vehicles without ABS in the US because they are required by law here.
Did you read the rest of the post where they mention a full US spec one would probably be $15-20K?
Me too. Otherwise, I am clinging to my '99 Silverado with 8 foot bed, single bench seat, and crank windows. (And no, it’s not my daily driver. I only use it when I need to move a Big Dumb Object, which is often enough in my line of work that it’s worth it.) I’m holding out hope that someone will finally make a usable electric work truck, but that chance was never that great and seems to be getting slimmer with each passing minute.
And before the fuckcars crowd jumps down my throat, my insurance charges me precisely $165 per year on this piece of shit, and it costs me $40 a year to keep it plated. That’s less than the cost of renting a U-Haul twice after you add on all their bullshit gotchas and fees.
My truck is a tool. It is not a vanity item or a luxury. Not only do I not need it to have leather seats, power everything, and a moonroof – I don’t want it to, because I will just break all of that stuff and it does not do anything to actually make the vehicle useful as a truck.
The shift towards massive vehicles (SUVs) and trucks loaded to the tits with tech junk is to blame. Auto industry sold the idea to Americans that their fat ass needs a compensator instead of psychiatric help.
Nah.
It’s poor planing and over spending that is the issue. People who lease cars are on an endless cycle of never owning anything and always laying a premium.
Just actually buy a car you can actually afford.monthly payments on and drive the car into the ground. Every car in have owned has made it at least a decade and a 150k miles. Once you are done paying off take what the monthly payment would be and out it into two banks account split 20/80. Woth the 80% being towards a new car and the 20% being for repairs.
My wife’s Honda has over 300k and still runs fine and doesn’t use oil. We put $10k aside for an emergency down payment, but every month it keeps going we are a few hundred dollars wealthier.
I laugh at my buddies who constantly need to have new vehicle.
Too many see their car as a measure of their worth.
Funny thing is my wife bought herself a beat up 1980 squarebody pickup for hauling stuff around the farm and you cannot take it out anywhere without people stopping to comment it and she only paid 4k for it… Hell, we have near weekly offers from strangers to buy it off of us at a premium. I want to emphasise it is not some pavement princess it has whiskey wrinkles from past owners and plenty of rusty bits.
Exactly. I like cars so it starts to suck keeping them for 10 years but otherwise I’d be in continual car payments.
Also taxes and insurance get cheaper as the car gets older too, so that helps.
Yup. We run two cars since we both commute for work but one is fully paid off and the other one is almost done. They payment for the first one is now going into a repair account for it and a down payment account.
The reason we haven’t paid off the other car is because we had 0% financing. So the money going into the ally account is making us money vs the bank having it.
We also have a gm card and both cars are gm. So we should have several thousands to redeem on that towards a new down payment.
My brother in law and sister in law. They have two brand new leases and a house they can’t afford and have been borrowing money from my in laws to keep afloat.
Lots of people over spend this way. I had a friend who was making $700 a month payments on a used Mercedes suv as a new teacher.
Lots of people over spend on dumb shit.
This doesn’t work for me specifically, so it’s absurd and stupid that anyone else does it.
Wherever you live sounds like a shithole.
At my last place where we live for over a decade we had nice patio furniture and garden tools out on the front lawn and the only time something was touched is when a neighbor borrowed it for a day. Never had so much as a little kids toy taken.
You should hop in your car and move someplace where people don’t steal your shit. It’s easier than you think to set up in a new area ( I’ve done it multiple times in my life with less than $100 in my pocket. ) people only think they are stuck and it become a self fulfilling prophecy.
I live in NJ and my last car before this had a 100mile round trip commute on it. Last I checked they salt the roads. I don’t do any maintenance on my car. I take it in for service at the dealer during the finance period and then a local shop near me for larger repairs. I take it to a valvoline for oil changes. Last car I retired needed a total of 6grand in repairs over its life that weren’t regular maintaine. That is why I said to take 20% of the payment and put it in a bank account for repairs. You should read another person’s posts before making a bunch of self serving assumptions to make your self feel better
https://www.trustedchoice.com/insurance-articles/wheels-wings-motors/average-miles-driven-per-year/
Looks about dead average to me.
People in power will squeeze and squeeze. They’ll crank up the interest rates. They want you to default on the equity. Take your payments and your car. That’s how they make their money.
My wife and I bought a Nissan Rogue in 2020 for 22K. 2020 model with 1400miles on it. We paid it off in 3 years. Today with 35k miles on it the trade in value is 23k at the Nissan Dealership. What a crazy time in the industry!
