The Car Repossession Crisis
from Billionaire’s Club Hosted by Alex
America is currently going through a bit of a car repossession boom.Delinquent auto debt over 60 days past due is at the highest level it ever has been (including during the Global Financial Crisis), More repossessions than ever have taken place within the last quarter, and even if you don’t personally have a car loan this could still become a systemic issue that impacts you because auto debt as a whole is higher than it ever has been before. This record debt has also combined with record levels of depreciation to result in massive negative equity for more borrowers making it harder than ever to back out of these deals, ESPECIALLY on certain classes of vehicle. Now that sounds pretty bad just on the surface… but it gets worse. Several reports have found that we have slowly made auto lending so complicated and fragmented that between leases, lending, “buy here pay here”, cross collateralized loans and every other type of way to finance a car, it’s become next to impossible to track down how much we really owe (and how much is actually been paid back). Even the regulators themselves have basically admitted that they don’t really know how bad the problem is and how much this could all hurt regular consumers. Now I know this all sounds like yet another symptom of peoples personal finances being squeezed… which is… by itself… not exactly that shocking anymore… HOWEVER, the current repossession boom is (for now at least) a specifically American problem. A problem that is saying a lot of bad things about the… “unique”… ways that we borrow, consume and go broke…
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