Helping you navigate the new normal
The warnings keep coming about the underlying health of the US auto market. But, as with the subprime housing crisis, nobody wants to listen: Last October, the US Comptroller of the Currency warned that some activity “in auto loans reminds me of what happened in mortgage-backed securities in the run-up to the crisis“ Yet auto […]
May was “another fantastic month for US auto sales”. Or, it took the industry “one month closer to an inevitable downturn”. All depends on which analyst you talk to: Ward’s Autos called May’s sales the best since July 2005 LMC Automotive suggested growth rates were slowing, and could possibly even contract next year It also depends […]
Major problems are developing in the US auto market. The critical issue is that companies have been adding capacity since 2009 on the basis that demand would return to SuperCycle levels. But it hasn’t. The result is that the mass market has become more and more competitive. Only sales into the high margin luxury/pickup segments are actually […]
The blog is awarding itself a pat on the back this morning, as its forecast last month for the US auto market seems to have proved more accurate than those of the experts. Under the heading ‘US automakers increase incentives as sales fail to boom’, it forecast: “The blog therefore suspects that March will be […]
This month is likely to be a very good time to buy a new car in the US. The reason is that auto manufacturers had believed that a recovery in consumer spending and the economy had become inevitable. Thus they had built inventories of new cars in anticipation of the sales rush. These are now […]
One characteristic of recessions is that recovery is always ‘just around the corner’. We can see this pattern in today’s US auto market. Since 2009, forecasters have been convinced that sales will quickly return to Supercycle levels of 15-17 million/…
Chrysler CEO, Sergio Marchionne, has issued a wake-up call to Western auto companies about the growth of China’s exports. He warns that they “can’t count on dramatic growth in Asia to drive prosperity”, and suggests that China’s plans to increase auto…