Tag: incentives

Auto Sales Disappoint Despite Surging Incentives, “Worrisome Trends Are Taking Hold”

Tyler Durden's picture

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/01/2016 13:15 -0400

Just as we predicted, it seems – despite the “everything is awesome” jobs data – that auto sales exuberance has hit the wall of credit saturation. Despite a surge in incentives in Q1, GM US auto sales rose just 0.6% (drastically lower than 6.0% rise expectations) and Ford rose 7.8% (missing expectations of a 9.4% surge). As J.D.Power notes “there are worrisome trends below the surface” of auto sales and with inventories at levels only seen once in the last 24 years (and tumbling used car prices), the automakers have a major problem if this is anything but ‘transitory’.

It wasn’t just GM and Ford though:

  • *FIAT CHRYSLER MARCH U.S. AUTO SALES RISE 8.1%, EST. UP 14%
  • *FIAT CHRYSLER HALTED IN MILAN, LIMIT DOWN AFTER FALLING 4.9%
  • *HONDA MARCH U.S. AUTO SALES UP 9.4%, EST. UP 16%
  • *VOLKSWAGEN OF AMERICA MARCH AUTO SALES DOWN 10.4%
  • *TOYOTA MARCH U.S. AUTO SALES DOWN 2.7%, EST. UP 5.6%

U.S. light-vehicle deliveries, aided by low gasoline prices, rising discounts and favorable financing terms, have climbed 3.4 percent this year through February after rising 5.7 percent to a record 17.47 million in 2015. But on a selling-day-adjusted basis, new-vehicle retail sales in March are expected to fall 2 percent from a year ago, according to a joint sales forecast by J.D. Power and LMC Automotive. It would be the first time there has been a year-over-year decline in sales on an adjusted basis since August 2010, Power and LMC say.

What is most troubling however is, as JD Power notes, the worrisome trends below the surface…

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THE REAL REASON THE AMERICAN DREAM IS UNRAVELING

Marketwatch posted an article this week titled Why the American Dream is Unraveling, in 4 charts. As usual, the MSM journalist and the liberal Harvard academic can create charts that reveal a huge problem, but they completely misdiagnose the causes and offer the typical wrong solution of taking more money from producers and handing it to the poor, with no strings attached. This has been the standard operating procedure since LBJ began his War on Poverty 50 years ago. Do these control freaks ever step back and assess how that war is going?

The poverty rate had plunged from 34% in 1950 to below 20% before LBJ ever declared war. It continued down to 15% just as the welfare programs began to be implemented. The percentage of people living in poverty hasn’t budged from the 15% range since the war began. This war has been just as successful as the war on drugs and the war on terrorism. Any time a politician declares war on something, expect a huge price tag and more of the “problem” they are declaring war upon.

The Federal government runs over 80 means-tested welfare programs that provide cash, food, housing, medical care, and targeted social services to poor and low-income Americans. Over 100 million Americans received benefits from at least one of these programs. Federal and state governments spent $943 billion in 2013 on these programs at an average cost of $9,000 per recipient (not including Social Security & Medicare). That is 27% of the total Federal budget. Welfare spending as a percentage of the Federal budget was less than 2% prior to the launch of the War on Poverty.

In the 50 years since this war started, U.S. taxpayers have spent over $22 trillion on anti-poverty programs. Adjusted for inflation, this spending (which does not include Social Security or Medicare) is three times the cost of all U.S. military wars since the American Revolution. In terms of LBJ’s main goal of reducing the “causes” rather than the mere “consequences” of poverty, the War on Poverty has utterly failed. In fact, a large proportion of the population is now completely dependent upon government handouts, incapable of self-sufficiency, and enslaved in a welfare mentality that has destroyed their communities.

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