As if I need to make another comment about a, or multiple bubbles, but something has to give and here it's of course the consumer. New and used car prices are at all-time highs (nominal it sounds like, but tell that to someone whose wages haven't kept pace (i.e., almost everyone)). Housing prices are at all-time highs (in terms of price:income so no qualifier needed there). Tariffs are not being 100% eaten by the producers (duh), nor by the importers (double duh), and so the consumer is being hit by those. Health care costs are about to rise materially as we flip to 2026 for large swaths (all?) of the US population. Any tax relief seen by the average consumer is likely not even close to enough to counterbalance all the increased prices/costs.
HN is fond of saying that the only thing propping up the US economy at this point is AI investment (not informed enough to know if that's actually true, but outside of equity prices it sure seems like everything else is blinking "this economy sucks.").
So when will the music stop? Seems like it should've been "yesterday," but what's the argument for it to continue playing for the foreseeable future? The great wealth transfer? AI efficiency/productivity gains (without the vast elimination of jobs)? Something else?
On paper, nothing will happen. The wealthy in America will continue to get wealthier. Real estate and stocks will soar in value.
In reality, the dollar's true value will plummet. The FED is starting to lower interest rates again. We are likely going to undergo brutal inflation.
Crashing the economy is obviously very politically unpopular. The left/right will do whatever they can to keep this charade up, even if it means dooming the working class and throwing them some kind of bone to make them think they're ok.
The COVID pandemic was a good example of this. The working class got thrown a $2,000 check while there was billions given to bail out businesses/lots of fraud. Not a lot of people cared because hey, we got a $2k check... Even though that $2k check was not even close to maintaining their relative wealth pre-pandemic due to all of the government's inflationary measures.
There won't be a recession, it won't happen on paper. But the middle/working class will continue to be squeezed. And there will be programs to "rescue us." Maybe it's low cost home programs, maybe it's community college, I'm not sure. But I am sure it will never truly benefit the working/middle class, it'll just be a token to keep them from fully dying.
We've got an insane bubble right now. Quantum computing stocks are valued at $50b market cap with 0 revenue and no substantial finished products. Just research.
>So when will the music stop? Seems like it should've been "yesterday," but what's the argument for it to continue playing for the foreseeable future? The great wealth transfer? AI efficiency/productivity gains (without the vast elimination of jobs)? Something else?
They seem to have figured out that you can just simply stop caring about the needs of 90% of your population if you systematically withhold any wealth from them and concentrate it to the 10%. The plan it seems is that the economy will increasingly be driven entirely by the upper middle class and above (who are all doing better now than they ever have in history), while the rest of us are left to rot and serve their drinks and clean their homes. The future for the average North American is starting to look a lot like our southern counterparts, where the wealthy elites in the cities rule over an underclass of destitute poverty everywhere else.
The economy is a lie. There is no the singular, hive mind economy. There are several segments and it's growing ever lopsided and moving K-shaped. The so-called "precariat" are hurting very badly. It doesn't matter what sort of imaginary, incestuous valuations NVIDIA et. al. attain because it doesn't trickle down in any measurable fashion. There is an pervasive profit-price spiral of necessities is a huge contributor of ongoing and deepening inflation. And the random tariffs / punitive federal sales taxes are yet another inflationary policy. The ultra rich can and will deny technological un(der)employment is happening until the pitchforks come out, and then blame the poor for being lazy/stupid/slow/unfortunate/antifa/whatever.
we learned our lessons from 2008 and 2020. my random thoughts
1) money has nowhere else go for now
2) great wealth transfer = really doesn't matter as long as the super rich can keep inflating their wealth faster than us peons. if you are above that curve just stay ahead of it at all costs.
3) prolonged pain can be extended indefinitely for most people by keeping them perpetual renters / extending loan terms.
4) all else fails print more money and i guess when it all does collapse doesn't matter, retreat to X country or bunker (lol)
> New and used car prices are at all-time highs (nominal it sounds like
Well, yes, nominal. But no, not really. Cars (and really this isn't surprising) have been getting steadily more affordable over time. They represent about half the fraction of consumer income that they did in the 80's. AS ALWAYS, please just go to FRED to ask these questions before announcing incorrect answers on the internet. New car price[1] expressed as a fraction of median income:
It's an extremely inconvenient situation that Americans find themselves in, a sort of self-perpetuating cycle of car dependency that they reinforce because alternatives require far too much investment to make worthwhile.
I'm really glad that I can live in a city without having to own a car if I don't want to. It makes a significant difference to my monthly expenses. And, honestly, it's a lot nicer and feels a lot more free in many ways. Places are more accessible not less.
I can't imagine being on the bottom rung of society and having yet another awkward expense, especially because you become unreliable if you don't properly invest in the maintenance of the thing. Which might cause you to lose your income altogether.
It sucks that you need to own a car to get anywhere in most of the US. When my wife and I moved to Southern California from Chicago, we had a single car and tried to make that work for a while, but it was just not doable. We have a grocery store 2 miles away, but any other services are further than walking distance (and even the grocery store requires walking on the shoulder of a busy arterial road at a couple points. I used to bike everywhere in Chicago, but doing so here is too risky).
That said, the problems of car loans are far beyond that - From the article: " The average monthly repayment now stands at more than $750.". That's nuts! I make a solid upper middle-class income, and I can't imagine spending that much on car financing, regardless of the loan length. When we needed a second car, we bought a 6-year-old Volvo station wagon in good condition, it it's still serving us well. Many of my neighbors, who make about half what I do, think we're poor because of it.
It doesn’t take that much to for huge numbers of people to be able to transfer to car free existence. Zoning laws inside cities do a amazing amount to force cars on millions of Americans.
Car free access to existing transit hubs like metro stations is often horrible and not particularly expensive to improve.
This is an extremely privileged viewpoint. Even in Tokyo, people in the bottom half of the income distribution do not live close enough to popular transit lines to be as mobile as someone with a beater car in Dallas. They spend a lot more time commuting (and they can’t “just do some work on the train” because they have real jobs). Even in Tokyo, their commutes are crowded, they’re subject to the weather.
Being tied to transit lines—again, because even in Tokyo transit isn’t as convenient as point-to-point car travel—limits where people can look for jobs. That makes it a poverty trap because people can’t easily find jobs in different areas. And it makes having a family and kids much more logistically complicated. The most transit-dependent cities have abysmal birth rates.
I'm glad you have that opportunity too, but purely on the financials it's probably not so much of a win when you consider the heightened cost of everything (housing in particular) in a city, right?
For lots of America alternatives don't take that much investment. Creating a safe bike network would be relatively cheap and is feasible in large swaths of suburbs.
> if you don't properly invest in the maintenance of the thing
For me, it's not the money that's annoying (though of course I'm not pleased by the bills every once in a while). It's the amount of time it takes to keep a car maintained! Seems like just yesterday I took a whole day remote to sit at the mechanics shop for a tire change, but now I have to do the same for an oil change! For this precise reason I end up doing a lot of maintenance late.
It’s honestly becoming a national subculture. Being a “burnout”. In tech burnout means you’re exhausted on working on things. In America “a burnout” is someone so deeply in debt they don’t even try to really pay it off, they just ignore the debt and spend money on cheap thrills when they can. Obviously not something that you advertise about yourself, but go to any bar in rural south and they know what am talking about.
As bad as the debt situation is in the US there’s not much a collection agency can do to force you to pay relatively petty sums under 100,000 they will just harass you basically.
The Roman proverb goes “The begger laughs in the face of the bandit” so burnouts spread money before it can be taken from them, then turn around and beg for more. A person who’s established this mentality, the exact amount they owe is the least of there problems.
Being on the bottom rungs is actually a lot cheaper than "HN style" car ownership. Nobody expects your shitbox to be legal, or have compliant papers all the time. You're blue collar so you know people who wrench and trade favors here and there. Boss expects you to be late a few times a month.
There's a "welfare cliff" when you try to get into a "must have reliable transportation" job though
Converting away from cars costs almost nothing compared to continuing cars. The project to put California route 37 above water near the Sonoma-Marin County line is going to cost $10 billion without adding any capacity. That's one tiny little project. And people don't even want to attach a number to the external cost of pollution.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DRSFRMACBS home loans delinquencies look amazing right now, to the surprise of noone, since everyone is sitting happy having locked in their 3% rates a few years back.
My understanding is that Tricolor went under due to systemic fraud ("The core of the fraud allegations is that Tricolor illegally used the same loan portfolios as collateral for separate credit lines with multiple banks" to the tune of ~$200M)
First Brands also went under due to fraud ("First Brands had relied on billions of dollars in undisclosed debt, primarily from the private credit market, by borrowing against its invoices. This practice, known as factoring, kept the debt off the company's official balance sheet")
Yes, things feel tighter than they did in the years immediately post-Covid because there was a lot of free $ in the system, a lot of debt collections were paused, and Covid went on long enough for people to start treating that as the new normal when that was never going to be the case.
No, I don't see these as canaries for a 2008-esque event.
The scary thing to keep an eye on is commercial office space debt (e.g. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/HPP/) which is likely to cause a cascade of fire sales as 5/10 yr debt obligations come due and how that will have cascading effects on commercial bank loans. That will be a hairy situation, but, fortunately, once it passes, rents in downtown areas will plummet and there will be a huge surge in growth in response to more favorable rents. Right now, commercial rents are locked into untenable rates because the loans are contingent on those rates which is resulting in 30%+ unused commercial space in areas like downtown SF.
I'm surprised it has taken this long. Everything I thought I knew about economics (and basic finance) has pointed in the direction of imminent pain for consumers, but what I've been hearing is more of a dull ache at most.
I don't want a crisis, and if we avert one I'll happily update my beliefs. But even if the crisis comes I'll have to figure out why it has been so slow.
You’re probably underestimating how much credit is available to people. Having money issues? Keep paying your car while you borrow money from Klarna for your DoorDash chipotle.
It took long because during the last Trump era, lenders figured out a neat trick - extend the loan terms to 7 years instead of the conventional 5. That, and the low interest rates hooked people. This exaggerated during the pandemic with people taking insane $1000/month loans.
Trump comes back, downturn comes back to main street, and voila - loans running naked.
One thing the article doesn't mention is deportees. The administration always says illegal immigrants but when you look the vast majority that are being deported are documented people here under some allowed process, they just haven't been granted a green card yet. Documented immigrants have work permits, social security cards, all the thing to find housing, get jobs, engage in banking etc...
When they're picked up and going to be deported, do you think they're going to care about their car loan, home mortgage or credit card debt? Not even a little bit. I had a friend here awaiting asylum for 7 years. She was picked up by ICE, sat for 3 months in detention, finally just agreed to leave because that's was long enough to be evicted by her apartment (and get significant fees for it) be defaulted on her credit cards, and on her car loan.
Who pays for all that debt, in excess of $20,000 for everything. She never will, she goes to another country, finds a decent paying job because she has years of experience in the US and now speaks English. All very valuable skills to a lot of employers in central and south America.
Expect to see a lot more loans being defaulted on. We were lied to about the number of illegals. Now we're going to see the effect of deporting people who were working, participating in the economy, and happy to be here. All because the lies saying they were illegal.
There was a meme (most likely fake) post on reddit from an H1b holder who took out as many lines of credit as they could and left after the whole fee debacle. But there's that dark kernel of truth inside: if your job prospects in the country are wrecked, what's stopping people from cashing in on the way out?
>One thing the article doesn't mention is deportees. The administration always says illegal immigrants but when you look the vast majority that are being deported are documented people here under some allowed process, they just haven't been granted a green card yet.
Documented != legal, one can be documented and an illegal immigrant. If you have a deportation order with a final date in the past, you are a documented illegal immigrant. If you're unlawfully in the US due to overstaying your visa, you are a documented illegal immigrant. Practically every case in the past year has proven out to be the person deported was illegal.
>Documented immigrants have work permits, social security cards, all the thing to find housing, get jobs, engage in banking etc...
Yet they can still be illegal immigrants.
>do you think they're going to care about their car loan, home mortgage or credit card debt?
The vast majority of illegal immigrants being deported have none of those things. All cash.
>Who pays for all that debt, in excess of $20,000 for everything. She never will, she goes to another country
Car gets repossessed, house gets foreclosed. The majority have miniscule or nonexistent credit card debt. Less than a rounding error for the economy as a whole.
Their deportation will increase housing supply, which reduces rent and home prices though!
>We were lied to about the number of illegals. ... All because the lies saying they were illegal.
This goes way beyond the high price of cars or people taking out loans with bad terms.
Americans are struggling all over. Rent is skyrocketing. Inflation is applying massive pressure on regular expenses. Household debt is at an all time high. People all over the country are struggling to keep their utilities connected as energy prices soar. Foreclosures are surging. Individual chapter 7 bankruptcy filings are up 15% from last year too. It's really no wonder repossessions are spiking too.
Economically, things look pretty bleak for a huge percentage of Americans and I'm not seeing much to convince me that they're going to get better any time soon.
And yet Americans are door dashing more than ever and financing everything imaginable.
Not saying citizens deserve this but we eagerly gobble up every excuse possible and then complain that our lifestyles aren't sustainable.
The typical American lifestyle is based around excess. It's no surprise that a nation who spends 3x more on unnecessary garbage than any other nation is struggling financially as climate change makes that excess more expensive.
We do this to ourselves with our pride/ego fixation and our endless excuses for why someone else should fix things or someone else is responsible for it.
We don't vote. We don't think critically. We don't do the hard work to benefit our society long term. We buy into every possible excuse.
A lot of that is that Americans are buying trucks, not cars. It’s easy to stay under $30k with a sedan, but a sizable group of people think they need the image of driving a full-sized pickup truck to the office and each 7 year loan on an $80k truck is going to drive the average up, not to mention leaving the buyer more cash-strapped due to the higher operating costs.
The average has just gone past $50l but it is not clear it will stay there. There are a few things that drove it up recently.
One contributor was a surge in EV sales to beat the expiration of the tax credits. EVs on average cost more than non-EVs so that pushed the average up. EVs were almost 12% of September sales with an average price of $58k.
There are plenty of EVs a lot lower that than that, so why was the average EV so high? That brings is to another contribution: in general it was upper-end buyers who currently dominate the market (the potential lower end buyers are probably too worried about the economy and maybe the likely big increases in health insurance for 2026 to buy a car now). Upper end buyers tend to go for the more luxurious cars, whether they are buying an ICE or EV.
Remember though, just because the average is about $50k doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of good new cars for a lot less. A 2026 Toyota Corolla has a base MSRP of $22 725. For $24 575 you can get the hybrid which increases the MPG from 32 city/41 highway to 53 city/46 highway.
Yeah the average is high, that means there are cars cheaper than that. People are spending big because they either are doing no researchand getting suckered, or they are buying nicer cars for vanity reasons.
I once clicked on a YT video about irresponsible debts, apparently it's a popular genre there, don't do it or you'll get a flood of these for a few weeks minimum. The interesting note I saw there was that apparently in USA car credits are now reaching into 7 and 8 years length (from typical maximum of 5 or so) and their rates are reaching well into 20% or higher. And that's not on a housing, that's on depreciating expensive cars. Another new idea for me was the fact that people with car debt, are doing "trade-in" of sorts, giving up old unpaid car for a newer better one, with an even bigger total debt. That was really eye opening stuff.
> "Distress in auto lending broadly is often seen as a bellwether to changing circumstances in the US economy, because Americans particularly in the lower-income brackets tend to put their highest priority in auto payments," said Brett House...
Or, put another way, when the bills come in, people make their car payments first, because they have to get to work. So either there are other bills people aren't paying, or people aren't going to work. Both seem bad. One purported cause of increased auto loan defaults is that people are having to make student loan payments again, although that would suggest they aren't prioritizing the auto payments.
Funny how a lot was going really well thanks to the last administration. Full employment, hot economy, and administration going after the billionaires. Wow...so much has changed in a year. We piss off the world, we implement tariffs hapharzardly, car and car prices soar and the rich get richer. Brace yourself....
Related: U.S. Consumers Are Collapsing: Cars, Credit, & the Chaos Ahead | The Weekly Wrap - Steve Eisman (Steve Carell’s character from The Big Short) interviews Lakshmi Ganapathi. Uploaded 2025-10-03.
They're typically sold at auction to dealers and individuals. If there's a flood of them, that means that they'll cost less at auction and the prices in the used car market may start coming back down from the crazy heights they've been at.
Depends on who is operating higher up in value ladder probably ends up in auctions by lenders. But lower cases it is revolving system. Where the seller takes vehicle back and sells it again. Sometimes multiple times...
Auctions. Sometimes bought by private buyers, sometimes by dealers who then on-sell them. Government and corporate fleet vehicles are usually sold at auction as well, likely mandated after a few years or mileage figure.
You think so? Owner financed car loans and repossessions are incredibly profitable, typically the value of the car 3-4 times over. Or so I’ve been told by someone in that business.
harmmonica|4 months ago
HN is fond of saying that the only thing propping up the US economy at this point is AI investment (not informed enough to know if that's actually true, but outside of equity prices it sure seems like everything else is blinking "this economy sucks.").
So when will the music stop? Seems like it should've been "yesterday," but what's the argument for it to continue playing for the foreseeable future? The great wealth transfer? AI efficiency/productivity gains (without the vast elimination of jobs)? Something else?
dinobones|4 months ago
In reality, the dollar's true value will plummet. The FED is starting to lower interest rates again. We are likely going to undergo brutal inflation.
Crashing the economy is obviously very politically unpopular. The left/right will do whatever they can to keep this charade up, even if it means dooming the working class and throwing them some kind of bone to make them think they're ok.
The COVID pandemic was a good example of this. The working class got thrown a $2,000 check while there was billions given to bail out businesses/lots of fraud. Not a lot of people cared because hey, we got a $2k check... Even though that $2k check was not even close to maintaining their relative wealth pre-pandemic due to all of the government's inflationary measures.
There won't be a recession, it won't happen on paper. But the middle/working class will continue to be squeezed. And there will be programs to "rescue us." Maybe it's low cost home programs, maybe it's community college, I'm not sure. But I am sure it will never truly benefit the working/middle class, it'll just be a token to keep them from fully dying.
carabiner|4 months ago
ramesh31|4 months ago
They seem to have figured out that you can just simply stop caring about the needs of 90% of your population if you systematically withhold any wealth from them and concentrate it to the 10%. The plan it seems is that the economy will increasingly be driven entirely by the upper middle class and above (who are all doing better now than they ever have in history), while the rest of us are left to rot and serve their drinks and clean their homes. The future for the average North American is starting to look a lot like our southern counterparts, where the wealthy elites in the cities rule over an underclass of destitute poverty everywhere else.
burnt-resistor|4 months ago
ookblah|4 months ago
1) money has nowhere else go for now
2) great wealth transfer = really doesn't matter as long as the super rich can keep inflating their wealth faster than us peons. if you are above that curve just stay ahead of it at all costs.
3) prolonged pain can be extended indefinitely for most people by keeping them perpetual renters / extending loan terms.
4) all else fails print more money and i guess when it all does collapse doesn't matter, retreat to X country or bunker (lol)
ajross|4 months ago
Well, yes, nominal. But no, not really. Cars (and really this isn't surprising) have been getting steadily more affordable over time. They represent about half the fraction of consumer income that they did in the 80's. AS ALWAYS, please just go to FRED to ask these questions before announcing incorrect answers on the internet. New car price[1] expressed as a fraction of median income:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1NbqH
[1] Actually it's new car CPI, so the values are unitless.
dijit|4 months ago
I'm really glad that I can live in a city without having to own a car if I don't want to. It makes a significant difference to my monthly expenses. And, honestly, it's a lot nicer and feels a lot more free in many ways. Places are more accessible not less.
I can't imagine being on the bottom rung of society and having yet another awkward expense, especially because you become unreliable if you don't properly invest in the maintenance of the thing. Which might cause you to lose your income altogether.
gensym|4 months ago
That said, the problems of car loans are far beyond that - From the article: " The average monthly repayment now stands at more than $750.". That's nuts! I make a solid upper middle-class income, and I can't imagine spending that much on car financing, regardless of the loan length. When we needed a second car, we bought a 6-year-old Volvo station wagon in good condition, it it's still serving us well. Many of my neighbors, who make about half what I do, think we're poor because of it.
Retric|4 months ago
Car free access to existing transit hubs like metro stations is often horrible and not particularly expensive to improve.
rayiner|4 months ago
Being tied to transit lines—again, because even in Tokyo transit isn’t as convenient as point-to-point car travel—limits where people can look for jobs. That makes it a poverty trap because people can’t easily find jobs in different areas. And it makes having a family and kids much more logistically complicated. The most transit-dependent cities have abysmal birth rates.
ifyoubuildit|4 months ago
bcrosby95|4 months ago
arjvik|4 months ago
For me, it's not the money that's annoying (though of course I'm not pleased by the bills every once in a while). It's the amount of time it takes to keep a car maintained! Seems like just yesterday I took a whole day remote to sit at the mechanics shop for a tire change, but now I have to do the same for an oil change! For this precise reason I end up doing a lot of maintenance late.
itsme0000|4 months ago
As bad as the debt situation is in the US there’s not much a collection agency can do to force you to pay relatively petty sums under 100,000 they will just harass you basically.
The Roman proverb goes “The begger laughs in the face of the bandit” so burnouts spread money before it can be taken from them, then turn around and beg for more. A person who’s established this mentality, the exact amount they owe is the least of there problems.
potato3732842|4 months ago
There's a "welfare cliff" when you try to get into a "must have reliable transportation" job though
jeffbee|4 months ago
SeanAnderson|4 months ago
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DRCCLACBS credit card delinquencies are similar
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DRSFRMACBS home loans delinquencies look amazing right now, to the surprise of noone, since everyone is sitting happy having locked in their 3% rates a few years back.
My understanding is that Tricolor went under due to systemic fraud ("The core of the fraud allegations is that Tricolor illegally used the same loan portfolios as collateral for separate credit lines with multiple banks" to the tune of ~$200M)
First Brands also went under due to fraud ("First Brands had relied on billions of dollars in undisclosed debt, primarily from the private credit market, by borrowing against its invoices. This practice, known as factoring, kept the debt off the company's official balance sheet")
Yes, things feel tighter than they did in the years immediately post-Covid because there was a lot of free $ in the system, a lot of debt collections were paused, and Covid went on long enough for people to start treating that as the new normal when that was never going to be the case.
No, I don't see these as canaries for a 2008-esque event.
The scary thing to keep an eye on is commercial office space debt (e.g. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/HPP/) which is likely to cause a cascade of fire sales as 5/10 yr debt obligations come due and how that will have cascading effects on commercial bank loans. That will be a hairy situation, but, fortunately, once it passes, rents in downtown areas will plummet and there will be a huge surge in growth in response to more favorable rents. Right now, commercial rents are locked into untenable rates because the loans are contingent on those rates which is resulting in 30%+ unused commercial space in areas like downtown SF.
watersb|4 months ago
Let me get this straight.
A landlord cannot lower the rent, because they took out a loan on the property which promised to the lender that the rent is a particular amount?
> which is resulting in 30%+ unused commercial space in areas like downtown SF.
The loan prevents the landlord from lowering the rent, so the landlord realizes rental income of $0 on the property.
Oh, that's just great.
jfengel|4 months ago
I don't want a crisis, and if we avert one I'll happily update my beliefs. But even if the crisis comes I'll have to figure out why it has been so slow.
electric_muse|4 months ago
nine_zeros|4 months ago
Trump comes back, downturn comes back to main street, and voila - loans running naked.
elmerfud|4 months ago
When they're picked up and going to be deported, do you think they're going to care about their car loan, home mortgage or credit card debt? Not even a little bit. I had a friend here awaiting asylum for 7 years. She was picked up by ICE, sat for 3 months in detention, finally just agreed to leave because that's was long enough to be evicted by her apartment (and get significant fees for it) be defaulted on her credit cards, and on her car loan.
Who pays for all that debt, in excess of $20,000 for everything. She never will, she goes to another country, finds a decent paying job because she has years of experience in the US and now speaks English. All very valuable skills to a lot of employers in central and south America.
Expect to see a lot more loans being defaulted on. We were lied to about the number of illegals. Now we're going to see the effect of deporting people who were working, participating in the economy, and happy to be here. All because the lies saying they were illegal.
morkalork|4 months ago
throwawaypath|4 months ago
Documented != legal, one can be documented and an illegal immigrant. If you have a deportation order with a final date in the past, you are a documented illegal immigrant. If you're unlawfully in the US due to overstaying your visa, you are a documented illegal immigrant. Practically every case in the past year has proven out to be the person deported was illegal.
>Documented immigrants have work permits, social security cards, all the thing to find housing, get jobs, engage in banking etc...
Yet they can still be illegal immigrants.
>do you think they're going to care about their car loan, home mortgage or credit card debt?
The vast majority of illegal immigrants being deported have none of those things. All cash.
>Who pays for all that debt, in excess of $20,000 for everything. She never will, she goes to another country
Car gets repossessed, house gets foreclosed. The majority have miniscule or nonexistent credit card debt. Less than a rounding error for the economy as a whole.
Their deportation will increase housing supply, which reduces rent and home prices though!
>We were lied to about the number of illegals. ... All because the lies saying they were illegal.
No we weren't. They are illegal.
throwway120385|4 months ago
Remember this the next time someone starts trying to shit-stir about an invisible group of people here.
autoexec|4 months ago
Americans are struggling all over. Rent is skyrocketing. Inflation is applying massive pressure on regular expenses. Household debt is at an all time high. People all over the country are struggling to keep their utilities connected as energy prices soar. Foreclosures are surging. Individual chapter 7 bankruptcy filings are up 15% from last year too. It's really no wonder repossessions are spiking too.
Economically, things look pretty bleak for a huge percentage of Americans and I'm not seeing much to convince me that they're going to get better any time soon.
chneu|4 months ago
Not saying citizens deserve this but we eagerly gobble up every excuse possible and then complain that our lifestyles aren't sustainable.
The typical American lifestyle is based around excess. It's no surprise that a nation who spends 3x more on unnecessary garbage than any other nation is struggling financially as climate change makes that excess more expensive.
We do this to ourselves with our pride/ego fixation and our endless excuses for why someone else should fix things or someone else is responsible for it.
We don't vote. We don't think critically. We don't do the hard work to benefit our society long term. We buy into every possible excuse.
maxerickson|4 months ago
https://www.lendingtree.com/auto/debt-statistics/
The main pattern is that people are paying a lot for cars. Looks like a lot of 6 year+ loans in the new market.
jeffbee|4 months ago
micromacrofoot|4 months ago
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/10/17/50000-new...
Starting to find out the risks of a car-centric society in a slow-burn economic crisis.
acdha|4 months ago
tzs|4 months ago
One contributor was a surge in EV sales to beat the expiration of the tax credits. EVs on average cost more than non-EVs so that pushed the average up. EVs were almost 12% of September sales with an average price of $58k.
There are plenty of EVs a lot lower that than that, so why was the average EV so high? That brings is to another contribution: in general it was upper-end buyers who currently dominate the market (the potential lower end buyers are probably too worried about the economy and maybe the likely big increases in health insurance for 2026 to buy a car now). Upper end buyers tend to go for the more luxurious cars, whether they are buying an ICE or EV.
Remember though, just because the average is about $50k doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of good new cars for a lot less. A 2026 Toyota Corolla has a base MSRP of $22 725. For $24 575 you can get the hybrid which increases the MPG from 32 city/41 highway to 53 city/46 highway.
olyjohn|4 months ago
lotsofpulp|4 months ago
There are very reliable, brand new vehicles for $30k. The extra amount is luxury.
Yizahi|4 months ago
derf_|4 months ago
Or, put another way, when the bills come in, people make their car payments first, because they have to get to work. So either there are other bills people aren't paying, or people aren't going to work. Both seem bad. One purported cause of increased auto loan defaults is that people are having to make student loan payments again, although that would suggest they aren't prioritizing the auto payments.
dragant|4 months ago
lurk2|4 months ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qd7akdDtPXA
scotty79|4 months ago
JohnFen|4 months ago
jagged-chisel|4 months ago
Ekaros|4 months ago
geor9e|4 months ago
prawn|4 months ago
themafia|4 months ago
Exceedingly dishonest. It was problems in the CDO market.
> "When you see one cockroach, there are probably more,” Jamie Dimon,
Exceedingly ironic.
insane_dreamer|4 months ago
mupuff1234|4 months ago
Den_VR|4 months ago
Fade_Dance|4 months ago