Look Out Below: U.S. Auto Sales Heading for Nine Year Low
CSM Worldwide have some bad news for auto execs waking up to their skinny lattes. The automotive forecasters reckon the collapse of the housing market and soaring consumer debt will send U.S. auto sales plummeting by nine percent. CSM's Senior Economist connected the dots. "With many consumers having a harder time getting mortgages or coping with higher payments from their adjustable rate mortgages, there will be a considerable impact on light vehicle sales," Charles Chesbrough predicted. "Weak sales of existing homes and declining home values also are dampening consumer spending, leaving less money available for vehicle purchases." It gets worse. CSM's NA soothsayer says American automobiles sales will recover "no sooner than" the fourth quarter of 2008. In fact, Joe Barker says "market fundamentals have deteriorated and will need at least a year to rebuild." He also noted that the domestics' production is heading south, while the transplants' are ramping-up. As David Halberstram might have said, a reckoning is on its way.
More by Robert Farago
Comments
Join the conversation
Boy lots of doom and gloom here.Yeah gonna be a little down turn in the ecomomy home sales and car sales allways lead us in.and there gonna lead us out. Those of us that are old enough remember the oil crunch 74 to 76 then interest tates 79 to 82.Hell GM was going broke in the early ninetys.The doom and gloomers were wrong then, and thier wrong now.{I hope}
mikey, morbo, I hope the gloom/doom is wrong, too. However, if you are sitting in a Kansas cornfield and you see a BIG storm coming up, is it a) time to bring out the picnic, wine, women and song b) time to look the other way and plug your ears or c) time to find a farmhouse and join the farmer in his tornado cellar? You know, "just in case." Here are some links. Only read them if you can face what may be home-truths about what's going on around us, that the lame-stream media and wall street just ignore. And we all know wall street has such a stellar record of always making money for investors, right? Right (more kool-aid please) http://www.goldcentral.com/gold-coin-content/backgroundstories.html
Oh by the way, if you read all of the articles in the link (not just the top one), you'll find genuine differences in opinion even in the world of gold-bugs. All we can do, is brace ourselves as best we can for a downturn, and hope that it isn't as bad as it was for our grandparents 1929-1941. Of course there are some who say we're still in the big depression IF you take into account that people back in the day used to use mostly cash to purchase things. Put another way, how many of us have enough cash on hand to buy a house? How about a new car? My grandfather (b. 1883, d. 1974) bought a farm, paid it off, then built a house - cash - no debt, before he got married. Yep, as was typical for the day, he married late and there was a fairly large difference in age between he and my grandma. His first car? A new 1926 Ford Model T touring car. He paid cash for it.
You know, they said on the Discovery Channel that a big asteroid might hit the earth someday and wipe out all life. I think I'm going to look into buying some gold. :)