Car sales are in the tank, but I'm optimistic, much more so than I am for housing. First, here's the recent bad news on automobile sales: This is your basic falling-off-a-cliff chart. What's the reason for optimism? Take a look at the long-run history: I normalized car sales for population to compare past decades with recent experience. Observe that this is a cyclical variable. Yep, it sometimes goes down hard. Then it recovers. Next observe that we HAVE NOT BEEN OVER-BUYING cars like we did houses. That last spike was in 2000, just before the 2001 recession. In the housing boom years, car sales were pretty stable. (This series shows units sold; the dollars spent is a bit stronger in 2005, as we shifted to more expensive cars/truck/SUVs.) Complete Story » ...
Anytime
