Carmageddon Crashes into “the Recovery” Right on Schedule — EXACTLY as Predicted Here

The Great Recession Blog

Carmageddon, as Wolf Richter has called it, is hitting the US economy exactly as I said a year and a half ago would start to happen at the very end of 2016 or the start of 2017. Measured year-on-year, auto sales have declined every month of 2017, and are now starting to cause the financial wreckage that I said we would experience in what will become a demolition derby for US auto manufacturers.

“A stretched auto consumer, falling used [vehicle] prices, and technological obsolescence of current cars are ingredients for an unprecedented buyer’s strike,” wrote Morgan Stanley’s auto analyst Adam Jonas in a note to clients. (Wolf Street)

Stanley now foresees a “multiyear cyclical decline,” along with a declining “willingness of financial institutions to lend as aggressively as in the past.”

After an eight-year boom, the industry appears “to be hitting a point of diminishing returns where the tactics required to attract the incremental consumer may be putting even more pressure on the second-hand market, leading to adverse conditions for selling new vehicles….” not even record incentives, reaching $14,000 for some truck models, have much impact. Those are the “diminishing returns” – when you throw gobs of money at a problem and it doesn’t have much impact. Lenders, particularly the captives, stepped forward, making loans with very long terms, low and often subsidized interest rates (“0% financing”), sky-high loan-to-value ratios, and leases that gambled on very high residual values that have now gone up in smoke as used vehicle prices are heading south.

How many times have readers here heard me stress the economic Law of Diminishing Returns that economists and banksters and CEOs are almost universally ignoring. This exact scenario, you may recall, is what I said would happen this year, only I said it in January, 2016, year before it began:

Auto-traders are auto-traitors

I’m speaking here of the financiers and the manufacturers, not the buyers. Auto sales are at a record high (up 15% in 2015), and some look to that as evidence that the US economy is strong. I would say, instead, it is the exception that proves the rule. It is one more part of the problem because that accounting is all baloney, and baloney is why most of the world’s economic experts don’t see any of this coming. They believe their own baloney.

You have to consider what factors have taken auto sales to these supposedly soaring heights. In part, it’s consumer confidence, which is a positive tail wind for the economy; but terms of credit on automobiles have been extended out to all-time extremes, too, of seven years on a highly depreciable asset. Down payments have, as they were just before the Great Recession, been minimized, as has interest. Most of all, most of these sales are not sales at all. The industry now leases far more cars than it sells.

You have to wonder why so many economists are blind to how significant all of that is and to what it means. So blind, in fact, that they point to auto sales as an indicator of a strong economy when it is the same mess we saw in the Great Recession.Apparently economists are incapable of learning anything. So, the biggest scare here is how blind it proves the experts are who guide the economy.

Has anyone forgotten what supported auto sales in the year before the Great Recession? Zero interest, zero down, and zero payments for a year. At the time, I was asking, “What’s their end game? Where do they go from here now that they’ve spent the year giving away one-year leases because people can return all these cars at no loss?

What we see now is that the automotive industry has doubled down on desperation by adding to that original mess longer-term loans and particularly by moving toward leases and calling them the new auto sales. As recently as 2010 fewer than one in ten auto loans exceeded a six-year term. Now, that is the average loan length.

It’s dumbfounding to me that people are stupid enough to site auto sales as evidence of a healthy economy when they are built on such precarious terms and are mostly not even true sales. Just as in housing, we have switched from being a nation of auto owners to auto renters. As with housing, I expect a collapse of auto sales because it is built on a rickety foundation, but it will be a trailing trend because it depends on a weakening of the consumer base as the economy slides back into recession. However, it will increase the speed and depth of the economic collapse as it joins the forces of the fall.

Auto sales may not join the parade of panic until late in the year or 2017; but expect automakers within a year of so to end up right back where they were during the worst of the Great Recession … with less hope of a bailout. Oh, my goodness, the sheer stupidity!

…Does anyone remember 2008 when automakers went bankrupt-or-bailout? They’re betraying the bailouts we gave them by setting up disaster all over again.

…Total car debt in the US right now is 30% higher than it was at its last peak right before … 2008! It has risen from about 600 billion dollars in outstanding debt to over a trillion dollars. Does that really leave any headroom for market expansion? Are you seeing a pattern here?

It’s the same thing, but an order of magnitude greater, and anyone who is not steeped in economic denial could have and should have seen this coming. I knew it was coming and how long it would take because it is the same pattern I saw leading into the Great Recession. (I choose to learn patterns from history, but our leaders, including CEOs, do not.) As I’ve said before, we (as a nation) have learned NOTHING.

The Great “Recovery” is all about repeating the mistakes that created the Great Recession in order to recover the glory bubble days; only we are repeating those mistakes at a vastly higher magnitude because the Law of Diminishing Returns has reached the hockey-stick side of the curve. That is as true for the housing market and all of the Federal Reserve’s plans as it is for the auto industry and the consumer banks that operate in that industry.

The fallout from Carmageddon on banks and investors as well as automakers

Derivatives (remember those dangerously cloaked things?) made up of auto loans made to people with good credit have already reached their highest default rate since 2008 when automakers wound up having to be bailed out or barely escaped that kind of perverse salvation plan. JPMorgan Chase & Co. is now tightening up on any more auto loans.

And then there are the subprime junkers:

Institutional investors that manage other people’s money grabbed subprime auto-loan backed securities because of their slightly higher yields. These bonds are backed by subprime auto loans that have been sliced and diced and repackaged and stamped with high credit ratings. But those issued in 2015 may end up the worst performing ever in the history of auto-loan securitizations, Fitch warned.

And then there are those issued in 2016. They haven’t had time to curdle.

The 2015 vintage that Fitch rates is now experiencing cumulative net losses projected to reach 15%, exceeding the peak loss rates during the Financial Crisis. (Wolf Street)

According to Bloomberg,

Subprime auto bonds issued in 2015 are by one key measure on track to become the worst performing in the history of car-loan securitization … , which is higher even than for bonds in … 2007….  The 2015 vintage has been prone to high loss severity from a weaker wholesale market and little-to-no equity in loan contracts at default due to extended-term lending.

Gee, who could have seen that coming? Oh, yeah, me … clear back in 2015:

Auto loans and student loans are a leaning tower of debt. Auto sales have peaked only as a result of a huge extension of looser, loser credit where loan terms are now up to seven years long, and interest is low or non-existent as are down payments. The last time we saw such desperate financing measures in the auto industry was just before the Great Recession, and we all know what happened to the auto industry then. We also know what happened to the housing industry when it peaked because of this kind of looser credit. We’ve learned nothing and have repeated the problem … on steroids. So, another crash is coming. (“Epocalypse Soon“)

And even earlier than that when I wrote …

Another support given was that “sales of autos are still rising.” Wow! Only because of SEVEN-YEAR auto loans, zero-interest loans, and the fact that auto dealers are now counting leases as sales!

That’s the same easy-credit bubble that was created in housing! How can people not see that it is exactly the same thing — only in cars?

…Moreover, how can people not see that this was the same nonsense that got automobile manufacturers in trouble during the last economic crash? It’s why they went down at the same time housing went down. (“Sometimes When I Read Economists My Brain Hurts“)

Because of these extended terms on a rapidly depreciating asset, as I warned way back when the practice began, negative equity now averages a little higher than $5,000, which is the worst ever, and which means banks effectively have no collateral.

As Wolf points out, that negative equity now gets rolled over into a new car loan when the old vehicle is traded in, making the new loans worse than ever. So, the cause of bad debt spreads like cancer. (We see it happening, but we still allow it because we’re dumb like that. At least, those who are bankers and regulators are because they learned nothing.) Vehicle trade-in values have reached their lowest levels since 2010. That kind of date should mean something by association.

Speaking of the Great Recession, do you remember how some housing lenders made the subprime mess as bad as it was by not checking on the credit data of those they were making loans to? Those loans got batched into the derivatives that went bad. Well, the nation’s largest sub-prime auto lender, Santander Consumer USA, has only been verifying 8% of its loans! (Again, we learned nothing!)

In other collateral damage this week, General Motors announced closure of two of its car manufacturing plants. This is partly due to drivers switching to SUVs, but the increase in SUV sales is less than the decline in car sales.

Multi-industry factory output is down for the second time in three months, but that is driven largely by the crash in auto production.

Carmageddon has been building insidiously each month since the start of the year, but the impact of decline is now waking up banks, manufacturers and investors to the significance of this event, which I said back in January of 2016 would be just one part of a massive and slowly unfolding “Epocalypse.”

As the impact is summarized on Wolf Street (linked to above),

Over the longer term, Jonas gets outright bearish – and with good reason. He expects a slump that will last years. For 2018, he cut his previous estimate of 18.9 million down to 16.4 million, which may still be high. And for 2019 and 2020, he slashed his estimate to 15 million sales.

And how bearish for auto sales is this?

But he notes that to maintain sales even at that low level, the government would have to step in and subsidize in some way new car purchases.

There we are! We are right back to government bailouts of the auto industry in one form or another, even to maintain declining sales.

You see, the warnings given during the Great Recession were completely sure: if you bail the failures out once, you create “moral hazard,” which causes the greedy to double down on their stupid risks. They learned nothing. Forget the idea that CEOs are smart … unless by “smart” you mean smart at con games. If you cannot learn from an event as obvious and global as the Great Recession, you cannot learn from anything … not even to save your soul from its own corruption.

Why is it important that I point out that I predicted these things?

Because if someone can show these events are predictable — in how they will fall, how hard they will fall and even WHEN they will fall, then it becomes inexcusable that we went down this path all over again! The idiots who cause the problem can no longer say, “Well, we cannot be expected to have seen something like this coming.” Yes, they can be and should be expected to have seen it coming. It is inexcusable that they did not! So, let’s cut off that path of escape from responsibility for the wreckage that is coming due to their uninhibited greed and foolhardy risk taking.

It is also important because it is about destroying the economic denial that is rampant throughout this nation and that will destroy the nation entirely if it continues.

Finally, it is important because you might just stop to think that, if someone predicted the catastrophe that is unfolding right now a year before the first actual signs of failure began, then you might want to pay attention to rest of what he was predicting. And I beat that drum again and again because so few people are listening, and it is far past time that they did. It is time for this nation to wake up to its own economic stupidity.

Carmageddon was a completely foreseeable and, so, completely avoidable pile-up!

The Great Recession Blog