This is shaping up to be the third major global financial crisis of my professional life, which feels like two too many. [Editor’s note: I think it’s telling that Matt feels there’s at least one global financial crisis to be expected in one’s professional life – JT] There’s an idea that this one is different because it’s self-inflicted and not caused by some exogenous event, like the pandemic. I don’t entirely buy this because the first one also felt like a man-made event. How do I know? My first job out of college was working in the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) market.
If this is your first time reading The Morning Dump, I feel like this little bit of prologue is helpful in judging anything I might say. It was 2005 and the job market was showing weakness, so I took the first position I was offered at a firm that did third-party due diligence for large commercial MBS deals. These deals were happening so fast that the banks outsourced the job of proving they were legit to companies like the one I worked for, and my company was doing this analysis so quickly that it hired a small internal team to help produce the research.
It quickly became obvious to me and my girlfriend, who also worked there, that while any individual deal analysis made sense, that, taken together, any slip in the market would likely be catastrophic given all the underlying assumptions. I remember when the so-called elite bankers came down from [redacted] to visit our offices. They were barely older than I was, and I don’t remember a single one of them saying anything smart. By day two, they were mostly just hungover and ranking strip clubs instead of tranches.
While it was the comically overleveraged residential MBS market that took down the economy, the collapse of the commercial MBS market didn’t help. My girlfriend and I both found other jobs before the collapse happened, which is why I do this. It didn’t even occur to me at the time that there was a way to make money off the collapse, as they did in The Big Short, which is all to say that you should take anything I say with an enormous grain of salt.
This is a car site, anyway, and so I’m going to talk about cars. It would be nice to think that, if the markets continue to implode and we drop into a recession, which is a real possibility according to a recent CNBC survey, car prices would come down. Unfortunately, that’s not a given this time.
I’m going to start this morning with what happened the last two times we experienced a global financial crisis and why car prices were only briefly cheaper, which is what I think is going to happen this time. Why? A new analysis shows that most of the cheap cars you might want aren’t built here, and building them here might make them more expensive.
That isn’t to say that all the cheap cars are built elsewhere. Nissan might be shifting Rogue production here as automakers try to get around tariffs, though that isn’t a guarantee that we’ll suddenly get a huge increase in production, at least based on some other signs.
And, finally, even if production does shift here, even the mastermind of the trade war admitted this weekend that it’s going to have to be robots building things if we can to keep prices down, which is also what I’m hearing murmurs of from automakers.
Why A Global Crisis Doesn’t Make Cars Cheaper
Above is a great graph from the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank showing the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: New Vehicles in U.S. City Average. This covers 90% of the total population of the United States, and when the line goes up, people are paying more for cars, and when it goes down, they’re paying less. The little gray bits are the bad times. You can see the pandemic in 2020 and the Great Recession in 2008.
What’s interesting about this graphic is that the bad times don’t really line up with huge negative price shocks. You can see that cars got a little cheaper during the Great Recession and, briefly, stayed flat early in the pandemic. The expansion of the economy during the early Obama-era recovery, a shift in tastes away from sedans towards more expensive crossovers, and the reduction in used car inventory following Cash-For-Clunkers are all to blame for why we didn’t see prices for cars go down.
During the pandemic, the lack of available cars and a shift towards more expensive models (which I call trimflation) meant the sharpest increase in new car price increases going back at least to the 1950s. If you’re curious why cars got relatively cheaper starting in the 1990s, free trade (the thing the Trump admin is trying to get rid of) is one part of the equation.
Ok, I’ve written long enough that the markets have now opened in the United States and it’s officially a “bear market,” if only briefly (it seems like stocks are coming back a bit). The goal here by the Trump Administration is to build prosperity by erasing trade deficits. That is a thing that could happen. Or, as Robinhood’s trade director Stephanie Guild just said on Bloomberg, the tariffs are a “tax on every American.”
The 25% Tariff On Imported Vehicles Will Apply To 80% Of Vehicles Priced Under $30,000
Charts are fun, this feels like a good morning for charts.
This one is from Cox Automotive, which has a big analysis of the tariff policy out, and the reality is that these tariffs will impact cheaper cars in a big way:
According to our analysis, the average price of a new vehicle in the U.S. is north of $48,000. Importantly, however, more than 40% of new-vehicle sales by volume in 2024 were priced under $40,000. These “lower-priced” vehicles are particularly vulnerable to the new tariffs.
Our analysis suggests the 25% tariff on imported vehicles will apply to nearly 80% of vehicles priced under $30,000. Vehicles in this category include popular models such as the Honda Civic, Toyota Corolla, Chevy Trax and Trailblazer, Nissan Sentra and Honda HR-V.
What does all this mean for average vehicle prices?
In the coming months and years, as new tariffs settle into place, vehicle prices in the U.S. are expected to increase. A bill for the 25% duty at the border for imported vehicles and a 25% tariff on foreign content in vehicles assembled inside the U.S. will likely result in price inflation within the auto industry. Our expectation is that vehicles impacted by these tariffs could see prices increase 10-15%. In addition, given market dynamics, we also anticipate seeing at least a 5% increase in prices of vehicles not subjected to the full 25% tariff.
So, not down.
Some Jobs Will Come Back To The United States
Nissan has had a rough go of it and was considering cutting back jobs at the Tennessee plant that builds the Rogue. Now? According to Nikkei Asia, it’s possible that production does shift back to its plant.
Struggling with poor performance, Nissan had planned to halve shifts on some of U.S. production lines from April, reducing the number of Rogues and other models being made. Because of the tariffs, the company has decided to scrap those plans and instead increase production.
The Trump policy imposes a 25% tariff on cars imported from Japan and other countries, which raises the cost of exporting vehicles produced in Fukuoka.
Other Japanese automakers may follow suit. Automobiles are a key industry in Japan, with product shipments equivalent to about 10% of gross domestic product. The transfer of production overseas would lead to a drop in GDP, and measures to combat the hollowing out of the country’s industrial base will become a major challenge.
Does this mean that we could see the long-term shift in production to our shores? Maybe. Investment takes forever and requires confidence in the system. Are people confident in the system? Not so much. Welcome to the resistance… Bill Ackman?
It’s not impossible, though, as automakers can eventually do something. From that same Cox Automotive analysis linked above:
The auto industry is a high-cost, complex, long-horizon business that operates best in a stable, consistent environment. However, it is also a highly innovative, tech-intensive industry and one that has recently come under increased pressure by the success of Chinese manufacturers that have raced ahead in terms of speedy and efficient development cycles, as well as cost efficiency.
This situation comes at a time when traditional automakers are deeply engaged in rethinking decades of ingrained production methodologies. So, while the business of building, selling and servicing vehicles is highly dynamic, given sufficient time, investment, and the proper incentives, automakers and dealers should be able to navigate this challenge. The toughest part will be doing so without pricing more consumers out of the new-vehicle market, shrinking the market further.
How do we make cars cheaper?
This Probably Only Works With Increased Automation
Lutnick: “The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones — that kind of thing is going to come to America.”
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 6, 2025 at 10:52 AM
If there’s one face to put on all of this, it’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. While a lot of this is built on the President’s preferences, a lot of those preferences were informed by Secretary Lutnick. Conveniently, he was out on “Face The Nation” this Sunday explaining why we’re putting tariffs on penguins to bring jobs back here.
It’s anyone’s guess how any of this actually goes down, but if all the jobs come back here, it’s hard to imagine how the prices do anything but go upwards without some kind of labor shift. That labor shift? Probably robots.
You can read the whole transcript here, and I’m going to focus on one piece, about how this is going to relate to employment:
MARGARET BRENNAN: And you said that robots are going to fill those jobs. So those aren’t union worker jobs.
SEC. LUTNICK: No, it’s really automated jobs. It’s automated factories- automated factories. But the key is, who’s going to build the factories? Who’s going to operate the factories? Who’s going to make them work? Great American workers. You know, we are going to replace–
MARGARET BRENNAN: You said robots on other networks. You said that to FOX.
SEC. LUTNICK: –the armies of millions of people- well, remember, the army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little- little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come to America. It’s going to be automated and great Americans- the tradecraft of America, is going to fix them, is going to work on them. They’re going to be mechanics. There’s going to be HVAC specialists. There’s going to be electricians, the tradecraft of America. Our high school educated Americans- the core to our workforce, is going to have the greatest resurgence of jobs in the history of America to work on these high-tech factories, which are all coming to America. That’s what’s going to build our next generation of America.
This sounds a little bit like the old joke about how the bad news is robots are taking your jobs, but the good news is someone has to fix the robots, but the worst news is that someone just designed a robot that fixes robots.
My question is: Are there enough people to do these robot-repair jobs? There’s already an automotive technician shortage in the United States. What exactly is going to change that? The answer, I guess, is more robots.
What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD
For no reason, “Yoshimi Battles The Bing Robots Pt. 1” by The Flaming Lips is on my mind this morning.
The Big Question
If I handed you $50,000 today and you had to spend it on cars, what would you buy? How many cars?
The market still in theory at least responds to their customer base. Not sure the whole 5 years to get something out will work though. The recession era Chrysler products come to mind a thrown together parts bin special. But it’s hard to say what will take place. It seems like emissions are being backed off and the Chinese are driving BEV and components down. Allegedly there have been some gains in US based battery production too. I wish more manufacturers would take the initial maverick approach and stick to it. While keeping dealers in line.
With $50k I’d go through every system in my current car since I want to keep it forever…well, my mechanic would…and I’d buy a second inexpensive but fun car as backup, plus parts. Any extra money would go into the car reserve fund.
Of course its about the automation. AI powered automation. Its going to take so many jobs that a country has to prepare for that. Machines don’t pay income tax, so you need new taxes to cover the gap. And then once everyone is out of work you need universal basic income. So a country has to save massive amounts of spend at the federal level, and find a new way to generate revenue. And guess who has multiple AI companies, a global ISP to connect manufacturing and distribution to data centers, millions of cars collecting data to train AI, and a direct connection to the president.
I’m on my 5th or 6th recession now. The ones in the 90s were bad but not as bad as the dot bomb or financial crisis. Inflation in the late 80’s early 90’s was crazy interest rates in the mid to high 20% range. Job markets were all over the place.
50k to spend on cars? Well I have 2 and a scooter, so I’d sell the scooter and get an electric dirt bike, and do the engine swap on my van and get Krystal the Battle Hearse all finished up for post-apocalyptic uhh… larping. Even scrap steel is crazy expensive, and finding a scrap yard that’ll let you wander around and grab stuff is getting harder every year.
If I had to buy something new?
Toyota.
If had to buy something used?
Toyota.
If I had to buy something sad?
Toyota.
(JK.. kind of)
Understand your take here.
But almost 50 years of Toyota ownership has taught me a lot.
I will take something reliable and affordable. At least to me that is.
You don’t need to be brand-specific if it’s something borrowed. Does Toyota have a nice blue?
LOL!
Yes they do offer a decent blue.
Currently own a 2009 Toy for last 11 years.
Over 100K on it now.
Total cost to own for 11 years equals, gas, ins., etc.
Total cost of repairs?
Not one thin dime. It just all works. And does not make me sad…
How much would a electrified ’61-’67 Continental convertible run? Probably too much, I guess, and fifty grand would be just a down payment on those fully restored ’60s Mercedes-Benz coupés, cabriolets and Pagoda SLs some European restoration shop that I don’t feel like looking up will put together for you. So, maybe a high-option Mini, with the excess reserved to keep it on the road for a little while after the warranty runs out.
As far as automation goes, the value created by that excess productivity doesn’t necessarily have to go to the 0.1% if we can managed the general political and social will to do it. There won’t be as many jobs as robot boosters claim there will be, but with a proper regulatory regime those jobs don’t have to be 40+ hours a week, either. Instead of dedicating all the added value to higher profits or higher wages. a good amount of it could and probably should go to shorter hours. Elon Musk may expect his employees to work insane hours as do many white-collar fields these days, but it’s more than arguable that’s really isn’t how almost all of us want to live. Full-time hours can be cut back to 20 hours with two employees taking the position. Extended leave for childbirth and childrearing could be the norm, as could longer stretches of leave. That would leave time for any number of things.
It has been true for quite a long time now that we Americans produce way more than enough to afford everyone a pretty nice lifestyle if the fruits of our efforts could just magically be distributed somewhat equally. But it is frankly not in our nature to even attempt that. We created a societal construct that includes the right to get fabulously wealthy and the right to die in the streets, and we have too many people too deeply invested in that to change it.
Real talk, if anyone on here has any hot tips about how to get in somewhere as an apprentice mechanic (excuse me, junior automotive repair technician) I’m all ears. And hands, and feet.
I need work and I need it bad.
When I was in your position it was tough.
I went to every dealer in my area, spoke my truth, and was offered 3 jobs the first day. But that was 45 years ago…
I wish you the best of luck.
Ouch! When I got laid off 20 years ago, It took almost 2 years to find a comparable job, but fortunately had friends that were self employed carpenters and flooring installers that could use me enough to keep my head above water, while searching. Check your local community college online to see if they offer free job search assistance (some local outfits will use their free bulletin board before using a service)and resume refreshing. The hot rod shop I worked at part time was owned by the guy I had struck up a conversation with at the local watering hole. Way back in the late 70s, in junior high, I just introduced myself to businesses I could walk to, and got 2 good ones that way.
Hope you catch a break soon.
This.
The best, and most lucrative jobs I ever got were strictly done by walking in the door and asking. Screw the job ads, and classifieds. Showing some out of the box thinking even in 1972 paid off bigly for me.
My first job out of high school was building custom vans in 1975. Walked in and just asked for work.
Within 6 months a van I’d built was featured on the covers of Hot Rod, and Truckin’ mags.
Even now it’s easier to do that than waste 4 hours reading bullshit internet ads.
Since the earlier crisis was discussed, I’m wondering how subprime auto loans are going to factor in to this. I expect unemployment or underemployment will increase short term and people are going to prioritize their spending.
In case anybody was wondering where Lutnick’s millions of screw-turning peons might come from, the move by many red states (including my super-awesome home state of Florida) to relax child labor laws might give a clue.
Well, if the recent lack of Publix baggers under the age of 70 is any indication, I think a little relaxation is ok.Mostly sarcasm…the reality is my 14yo has a slim chance of getting a first job because there are still so many underemployed adults doing those jobs. We love to call today’s younger generation lazy, but I’m also not seeing the opportunities I had at his age. ALL my friends worked in food service in some capacity. I’m definitely interested to see how this dovetails with our auto industry up here in AL, where a Hyundai supplier was busted last year with 14yo kids on the assembly line (who had ostensibly lied and provided fake docs, but the burden is ultimately on the employer.)
Fantastic fantasy. We’re are all these technicians going to come from to build maintain and service these factories and equipment. They cannot get enough high power electricians to service the EV grid.
70+ year old baggers at Publix is real, at least in my area. (Daphne/Fairhope)
The ones, (cashiers, baggers) I have talked with have most all said they need to work, even if they don’t want to.
Yeah, this tariff bullshit will be a big help to inflation…./S
I’m a test engineer/product manager with >10 year of experience and I literally just finished applying to target as a stocker.
Oh, Mechjaz! Hugs
My wife can relate. She recently decided to either wrap up her practice and work for a law firm or to do journalism on the side (she used to be a baseball journalist). She’s found that the market today is impossibly difficult and was even denied a law firm gig meant for someone with a tenth of her experience.
I would either get a CPO MDX Type S or new CX90 to replace my wife’s daily driver. If I had the funds to spend on only myself, I’d buy all of the parts to K24 swap my NA Miata, and finish the track prep mods for my CTR (Just needs a hondata, Ohlins, Oil cooler, and radiator to be fully prepped.) Then take the leftover funds to buy the nicest F150 Crew Cab with a Coyote to have as a tow pig and that rounds out the family fleet.
I think that the big difference is that this crisis is being intentionally caused by two people who are also capable of stopping it, but won’t (Trump and Navarro). The 2008 crash was foreseeable, but it was an amalgam of decisions made by many companies and people over an extended period of time and couldn’t be easily backed down once it got to the edge of the cliff without something catastrophic happening. This is just Peter Navarro acting out his fantasies in the real world and Donald Trump letting him do it. He could be fired and the policies reversed, but that isn’t going to happen, unfortunately. And I don’t think any foreign countries would really trust it if it appeared to happen
Remember “irrational exuberance?”
Today I think a better term would be called “willing ignorance or willing blindness.”
Either way we are screwed…YMMV as always.
Some people are saying Trump is intentionally crashing the economy to drive down interest rates so he can refinance the national debt for cheaper, but I really think the whole 3D chess thing is a myth. There is no 3D chess game, it’s just Peter Navarro sitting on the floor swallowing checkers while Donald Trump kills time on the toilet doom scrolling social media
Exactly.
And the toilet man has no fucking idea how to run a business.
Good luck to you though.
For a long time I wondered how someone could loose money while running a cash only business… then my brother bought a bar. I got to see first hand how a fully self involved man child goes about incinerating a couple 100K.
To be fair, loads of casinos go bankrupt, including almost every non-Trump one in Atlantic City, and one of his before he even bought it (also, some of them avoided it only by surrendering their mortgages to avoid foreclosure or by trading debt for equity). Casinos are actually a pretty tough business that fail a lot, they often aren’t smart investments, similar to airlines (he also got involved in that industry, with even worse results). I’m not sure where the myth that they were money making machines started, it might have been true when Nevada was the only place in the country where you could gamble legally, so there wasn’t much competition, but, even then, when Howard Hughes died, his executors discovered that most of his Las Vegas casinos had been running losses for years, subsidized initially by profits from Hughes Tool, and then by the proceeds from the sale of Hughes Tool.
Not to go off track, but his net worth was only like $18 million at death, despite owning well over $1 billion in assets, since his businesses were so heavily leveraged. But, by restructuring debt, shutting down unprofitable operations, and pivoting to real estate development, his heirs did pretty quickly turn things around and ultimately did realize over $1 billion from his estate by the time things had all been settled and liquidated in the early 1990s
Indian gaming seems to be quite profitable, particularly for the local Chippewa Tribe once they ran off Jack Abramoff and company.
The Mohegans aren’t doing so hot with their business right now – they lost $323 million last year and are struggling to refinance the debt they have coming due this year – mainly related to a bad investment in South Korea, though they also didn’t do too well managing Resorts in Atlantic City (which was very briefly controlled by Donald Trump for a time in the ’80s, when he was feuding with Merv Griffin), and that hasn’t really done well in quite some time. They ended that contract at the end of 2024, that property made $5.3 million last year on $158.5 million in revenue, net was down 43%, gross was only down about 2%.
More worrying is Bally’s – they netted only $2.6 million for the full 12 months on $200 million in revenue. The average Lexus dealership made $4.5 million last year, owning one of those franchises is a better business than an 1100 room casino hotel with 80,000 sq ft of gaming space
In the now we all inhabit, organized legal gaming will suffer. But not without some poor souls betting all they have through economic crash induced addiction flares.
Kind of OT but what you wrote reminded me of what I read about Premier League clubs.
As glamourous and recognized as Premier League clubs are, the average club has lower annual revenue than Tesco.
One Tesco store.
Yeah, sports teams are usually more hobbies/vanity projects for already wealthy owners
I would spend $10k fixing my Prelude’s rust and $40k making my Stinger really really nice.
What would you do to it? They always catch my eye when I see them out and about.
For $50k? Forester Hybrid is an easy choice. I’m gonna cheat a little and say I’ll snag a Harrop supercharger for my BRZ. after install, that should eat up all the free cash on hand.
It’s a circular logic fantasy being done in the most clumsy, damaging (and offensive) ways possible. We are now a service economy, running a surplus, not a deficit in such. You can make money that way too, not just by manufacturing. But that requires looking forward, not backwards, which is the ever present flaw in all conservative thinking regarding such matters. It will always fail because progress is unavoidable no matter how much nostalgia you embrace and how hard you try to make people believe. Progress is just a fact and will always win over the long haul. Simply put, it’s better to repair a robot than work in a steel mill. While we will always need steel mills for national defense, making better money repairing robots is a good thing. And while the robot repair robot is a good joke, we’re still eons away from SkyNet, okay? LLMs don’t think, they simulate, and that’s not going to change.
I recently asked the rhetorical question if anyone has won an international trade war. Today I ask, has anyone ever successfully forced an economy to go back in time?
It depends on your definition of success.
I saw something the other day that talked about some steel tariffs saving or creating something like 2,000 jobs in the US related to the steel industry. The other side of the coin was the higher steel prices resulted in the loss of 120,000+ manufacturing jobs because the manufacturing moved over seas to offset the higher material costs with lower labor costs, to keep the product costs competitive.
Reminds me of that scene from Roadhouse, where the doctor in the ER asks Dalton if he ever wins a fight. He answers “nobody ever wins a fight”.
But we are a country of MAGA idiots.
Again.
Only about a quarter. A slightly larger quarter voted against (see the magic of the Electoral College), and the other half were either ineligible or didn’t bother.
Understand. I am an old person.
And the Electoral College may have been a workable idea in the 1700’s to about 1900?
Now it’s just bullshit, and not a true representation of the voters.
Maybe we need a new party.
I propose calling them:
Don’t give a fucks…
Evidence suggests they’d immediately have about half of the voting pool!
Definitely agree with you on the Electoral College needing to be a relic of the past.
I feel like it’s worth pointing out, that tarriffs can be a succesfull tool if used judicuosly to account for structural comparitive price advantages.
For example, a country that has manufacting capacity for clothing, but offers things like universal healthcare and social services (costs will be high and so will taxes) a tarriff can be used to offset the cost advantage of production in a country that does not offer those government funded services. This has some advantages over say subisidies because it offers the consumer the true, locally adjusted cost (exporting jobs and therefore tax base will add strain to the services no longer recieving funding from domestic enterprise) and becasue theoretically you could set the tarriff level only high enough to account for the loss of service funding.
This information is irrelevant to the current US trade plan because you can apply logic to it
Nuance is not part of the current tool kit. Nor intelligence.
I don’t know – apparently they used artificial intelligence to come up with that tariffs formula.
Jokes aside, I completely agree with you on the nuance part.
Simulated Intelligence. AI is a total and complete misnomer.
Apologies, but AI is starting to feel more and more like FSD every day. Like, it’s not that, but they keep calling it that.
I feel the same way about “reality” television. It’s not reality – they set up some sort of fake environment for the contestants/cast to play in and let the cameras roll. Whether it’s cooking, dating, “housewives”, or “random” people stuck in a dorm, island or wilderness… at its core, it’s made up circumstance.
The accurate name would be Artificial Reality TV. Just like how FSD doesn’t fully self drive.
I blame the Tuttles, and Orange County Choppers (though oddly enough, that probably was a whole lot closer to “reality TV”).
Afganistan.
Can I buy a car for $50 k this week?
If you hurry.
I’ve got a couple to sell at that price. 😉
I’d probably buy a nice (but not too nice) K5 Blazer, and some sort of a fuel sipper as a daily.
The K5’s are only going up in value, and it could also serve as a bugout vehicle.
I work for an automation company. Industrial robots, specifically. Guess where those robots are built. Here’s a hint: not in the US. Guess where they’ll be built in the near future. Also not the US. Even if we did start building some here, all the parts and castings would still be coming from overseas. So those new factories Lutnick is talking about might have a bunch or robots (good for my job, at least), but those robots and the parts required to maintain them will all be subject to tariffs, making the factories more expensive to build and operate.
I recall that during the CHIPS act, foreign chip companies had the concern that there were not enough capable workers in the US to actually man these plants. I imagine robotics would be the same.
Very true. We’re finding it hard to hire manufacturing techs right now, and most of those we do hire are of a lower quality than we used to get. Interestingly, the robots we get from Japan are assembled by other robots primarily. Of course, someone has to maintain those robots…
But who’s going to build the robots that maintain the robots that build the robots?
“It’s Robots All The Way Down!” -Peter Navarro, probably.
I’m sure Elon Mask has a plan which involves self-building robots.
I’m solidly in the GenX cohort. Recessions and “financial crises” throughout my life have always timed when I was finishing a degree or undergoing some other kind of life transition (and “R” presidencies). It really messes you up. I’m kind of at the “F-it” phase now. My job *should be?* ok, but I’m too young to retire, and being in the job market in my mid-50’s would totally suck. I’m not looking at my retirement assets but I’m sure they’ve declined by at least 20%.
Young Gen X here (Xennial?) and I feel this. The only thing I was truly looking forward to in the future was retirement at 60, but who knows if that’ll be able to happen now. Work seems to be stable, but that’s definitely subject to change. I’m still under 50, but the idea of looking for a job or going back to school now seems terrible.
Do NOT look at your retirement, I made that mistake this morning, and my involuntary reaction had concerned coworkers asking what was wrong.
I really wish I could just disengage from the whole system, “van life” (fancy homeless) is starting to look like a reasonable alternative right now. I could think of worse things than living in my 4Runner in the desert with my dog.
Some morbid advice. If your parents are healthy, alive (and not estranged) you need to talk about it now because there will be a time when they aren’t. I had that train hit during Covid. Health decline, nursing homes, estate sales, etc. Plan in advance if you can. Unless you are wealthy there are limited options to prepare for it. Good luck!
Thanks, that is great advice. Dad is gone since last year, and mom has her wishes in order. It is scary, because if my mom hadn’t made some good decisions, my dad’s care could have easily bankrupted her/us. A nursing facility with memory care is ridiculously expensive, and there are not many resources available to help with that.
As someone dealing with this right now, that’s solid advice.
Best of luck. It hit me really hard but we got thru it. At 50 I finally gave up my prude ways and hit the flower now and then (eddies). Can’t believe I waited so long.
Same here, bought a house in 2008 when we thought the market was done dropping, surprise! it wasn’t! Company I was working for went bankrupt and closed the facility I was at so transferred to the south so had to do a short sale.
Wwore off buying again but the rental market was being taken over by investors so rents just steadily go up now year over year, no major tax increases or improvements, but hey it’s $50 more a month every year just because so back to buying a house.
At least we got in just before the last major spike but can see that slamming back down with these shenannigans.
Agreed on the retirement thing, if I don’t get what I’ve been paying into the for last 30 years I’m gonna just say f it and move to Mexico and maybe what I make selling my house up here will set me up in a nice trailer down there and something to live on.
It’s a well established (and incorrect) myth that those “R” administrations are good for business.
Google presidential party affiliation verses GDP, and you’ll probably see some enlightening information.
Blew my old boss’s mind with that one. He tried to attribute it to bad luck, but there was way too much consistency for that argument to fly.
I know. They always say the recessions happened because their predecessors wrecked the economy and stuck them with the mess to clean up. Sound familiar?
Let’s fill in the blanks, no rules….
“Make America _______ Again”
“Rid of Trump and Musk”
Just leave it blank, “Make America Again” we had a good run but maybe it’s time we just wrap it up and start over completely.
We honestly need a new constitution be that will never happen until enough people realized that it wasn’t handed down like some divine word of G*d.
educated and literate
support science and research
Slaves. Yes, MASA.
“Gilded”
They’re doing their best to usher in the Gilded Age 2.0.
Gaslighted
Make America Great Again.
I think most of us here know how we can get there.
Yet that seems to require God shutting the lights off on a few people, for good…
“the armies of millions of people- well, remember, the army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little- little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come to America” – I take it that we are going to see lots of Chinese immigrants very soon to build all of our stuff in the US? Entire armies of them? Sort of like when they came to build the transcontinental railroad?
Even if the tariff stuff wasn’t happening, more robots were on the way. A lot more. There won’t even be forklift drivers or operators loading parts pretty soon in some of these places.
$50K that I need to spend on a car?
I’ll take a pair of post-facelift, pre-owned R129 Mercedes-Benz SLs
In Portugal
Or New Zealand
Or Spain
Or Australia
Or Ireland
Anywhere but in the US.
Another huge factor is what happens to credit for potential buyers.
If credit markets get hammered and start raising the costs of borrowing and/or refusing to loan, then the auto industry gets hit even worse.
This article points out just how important stability is to the industry. They can’t plan effectively if they don’t know whether credit stays consistent, or if suddenly it become impossible for a big percentage of the buying market to finance purchases.
And one of the lessons of 2008 is that nobody really understands all of the intricacies of the finance markets. What happens to lenders if they bet wrong on the growth of demand for auto loans? If borrowers start defaulting on loans due to unemployment in larger than expected numbers, what happens to repackaged securities based on those loans? Does it have an escalating effect like the rising rate of defaults of mortgages in 2008?
The right wing think tank idiots who are running the show simply wish away events like 2008. They are sure, somehow, the problem wasn’t due to overleverage and faulty economic projections, and therefore it can’t happen again. And this kind of stupidity only raises the risks.
Wonder if Nissan will be quietly cutting back on production of other models in TN? Murano, Pathfinder, and QX60 are also produced there, all more expensive vehicles, seems like a cutback in those wouldn’t hurt either. And most of those others have competitors that are US-produced too, so they don’t necessarily have the opportunity advantage there like the Rogue might. Rogue’s segment you have more of a mix with GM, Ford build their offerings in Mexico, Honda/Toyota are US & Canada but seem like they’d follow suit.
It’s at least an offset, since the Rogue’s engine is from Japan and the transmission from Mexico.
As to $50k today – might be tempted to go all in on one vehicle, like a new Passport Trailsport. But if I’m able to keep efficient daily anyway, an older 4Runner or a simple, more recent, non-Toyota-taxed pickup like a Ranger; if I can share the rest, a new Trax or used Mazda CX-_ or CR-V or something for my parents.