Guest Post by Eric Peters
The price paid for the average new car continues to climb – it’s about $34,000 now – but sales of new cars are declining. This seems cognitively dissonant.
Or at least, economically dissonant.
Shouldn’t prices fall when demand ebbs?
Continue reading “Supply-Demand Disconnect?”
Guest Post by Eric Peters
A piece popped up on the newsfeed quoting the uber hacks at Edmunds.com regarding the escalating price of new cars. Not one word in the piece about the cost of government mandates – hence my use of the term uber hack to describe those who produced it.
Noting that the average car loan is now 69.3 months, or six years – which is the longest average for car loans in the history of the car business – and noting further that a large and growing number of people who are hag-ridden by this endless debt never actually pay off the loan but rather fold it into their next loan – the column’s chirpy birdie author explains that it is all due to . . .
“Those who are capable of tyranny are capable of perjury to sustain it.” ― Lysander Spooner
We all know the BLS artificially suppresses the CPI through bullshit substitution adjustments, quality adjustments, and various other incomprehensible hedonic adjustments made by government apparatchiks at the behest of their politician bosses. Some obscure theoretical academic calculation called owners equivalent rent accounts for almost a quarter of the CPI weighting.
It has no relation to reality as it has increased by only 12% since 2012, while the Case Shiller Housing Price Index is up 52% over the same time frame. The median price of existing home sales is up 30% over the same time frame. It also has no relation to rent increases, as they have gone up 22% nationally since 2012. It’s essentially a made up number by goal seeking bureaucrats doing the bidding of their establishment masters.