Auto Sales

Judging by the smiling Phil LeBeau who earlier opined of an 8.9% plunge in For F-Series sales that "I don't know if I'd Call that a slowdown," you would think the US Auto industry was killing it. Apart from the fact that all but the most luxurious brands missed expectations, we sum up the month of June's results by nothing the credit-spewed spike in May is now over and domestic car sales are continuing to trend lower. This is the biggest MoM drop since Sept 2014. As Ward's notes, they have now missed expectations for 6 of th elast 7 months...

This wasn't supposed to happen...

What to expect next week.

"Of the subprime vehicle loans bundled into securities, 73 percent now exceed five years, up from 64 percent during the first three months of 2014. 'Because cars depreciate quickly, a borrower is typically upside down or underwater toward the end of a long loan term.' 'The risk is that you extend a loan that a borrower cannot afford over its term schedule. Inching out to 75 and 84 months, I don’t think that has been tested yet.'"

"China, the world’s largest car market by sales, has been the main engine of profitability for the likes of BMW, Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz car division and Audi in recent years, helping paper over structural weakness in Europe. But according to one Chinese dealer representative: “the cash cow is dying”.

Last week the government reported personal income and spending for April. After months of blaming non-existent consumer spending on cold weather, shockingly occurring during the Winter, the captured mainstream media pundits, Ivy League educated Wall Street economist lackeys, and Keynesian loving money printers at the Fed have run out of propaganda to explain why Americans are not spending money they don’t have. The corporate mainstream media is now visibly angry with the American people for not doing what the Ivy League propagated Keynesian academic models say they should be doing. An economy built upon the consumption of iGadgets, Cheetos, meat lovers stuffed crust pizza, and slave labor produced Chinese baubles, along with the production of enough arms to blow up the world ten times over, and the doling out of trillions to the non-productive class, is doomed to fail.

Welcome to the new normal... The "if we build it (and offer credit to anyone who can fog a mirror), they will come" economy. While LeBeau and his cronies are cock-a-hoop over auto sales (no matter how those sales are achieved), it seems the carmakers are way ahead as the value of cars on the sidelines (inventories) has never, ever, been greater than now.

It has been a mostly quiet overnight session with Europe solidly green on another bout of Greek hope even as Bundesbank's Weidmann warned that Greek insolvency risks are rising and Greece reporting that its unemployment rose once more from 26.1% to 26.6% in Q1, in which we got two more rate cuts by New Zealand (which sent the Kiwi crashing the most since 2011) and South Korea (the Won initially dipped only to rebound) but China stole the stage with its latest report on retail sales, industrial production, and fixed investment all of which showed a modest bounce from multi-year lows suggesting the PBOC's attempts to shock the economy into growth may be starting to work (which is bad news for the market).

Why has the dollar jumped in recent weeks?  Global conspriacy and lies?  Are thousands of investors and participants being deluded?  

"The elderly dependency ratio is in the early stages of a relentless rise that doesn't hit an interim peak until around 2036, over two decades from now." The "structural shift" in the dynamics that drove the economy and financial markets in the 80's and 90's will not likely exist again for quite some time. Of course, if this was not the case, would we still be needing massive Central Bank interventions to support global economies and markets? Meh? What could possibly go wrong? [sarcasm alert]

"Only if the economy is powered by the marginal borrower who will no longer borrow after a 0.25% hike, does it make sense to believe a hike will derail the economy.  Comparisons to 1937, where a hike pushed the US into recession, are incomparable and groundless.  On the other hand, maybe the FOMC is worried that the ‘no free lunch’ concept makes them suspicious of the possibility of a meaningfully deleterious market reaction which could have a negative impact on the broader economy.  However, under this logic, delaying a hike would only exacerbate such a response."

Ali and Frazier, Laurel and Hardy, Mayweather and Pacquiao, Liesman and Santelli, and now Schiff and Maloney. Peter and Mike join clash of the titan-like to discuss their investment strategies and expose the charts the government doesn't want you to seeas "people like Bernanke are taken seriously still and the people that did predict [the crisis] are dismissed as lunatics half the time." The wide-reaching conversation covers everything from gold and stocks to The Fed and The Dollar - Bernanke "took the coward’s way out because all he did was exacerbate the problems to postpone the day of reckoning." The air is coming out of the bubble, they warn, "Bernanke and Greenspan have absolutely destroyed America. People don’t realize what is coming..."

May was a banner month for car sales and it's easy to see why. Nearly every conceivable metric for financing hit a record in Q1 according to Experian, including average loan term and average amount financed, suggesting the trillion-dollar US auto loan market has officially hit bubble territory. Meanwhile, the "cash out auto loan" is the new home equity loan.