Twin Trillion-Dollar Bubbles Prompt Dramatic Rise In Non-Mortgage Debt

Don't look now, but the US is staring down not one but two trillion-dollar bubbles, both of which have been documented here extensively. 

The first is the US auto loan bubble which has ballooned to $900 billion on the back of loose underwriting standards. Don't believe easy credit is behind the inexorable rise in auto loan debt? Consider the following Q1 statistics from Experian which we never tire of showing:

  • Average loan term for new cars is now 67 months — a record.
  • Average loan term for used cars is now 62 months — a record.
  • Loans with terms from 74 to 84 months made up 30%  of all new vehicle financing — a record.
  • Loans with terms from 74 to 84 months made up 16% of all used vehicle financing — a record.
  • The average amount financed for a new vehicle was $28,711 — a record.
  • The average payment for new vehicles was $488 — a record.
  • The percentage of all new vehicles financed accounted for by leases was 31.46% — a record.
  • Sitting behind the auto lending boom is Wall Street's securitization machine which will churn out around $100 billion in auto loan-backed paper this year (for perspective, that accounts for around half of total projected consumer ABS issuance). The longer the Fed-driven hunt for yield persists, the more demand they'll be for this paper and the more demand there is, the easier it will be to get a car loan and larger the bubble will become. 

    Meanwhile, the nation's student debt bubble has reached epic proportions, with students and former students laboring (or perhaps “not laboring” is more appropriate given what we know about how difficult it is for degreed millennials to find good jobs) under a debt burden that averages $35,000 per student and totals a staggering $1.2 trillion in aggregate. As we've detailed exhaustively, debt service payments on these loans are causing delays in household formation and driving up demand for rentals in a market that's already red hot thanks to the fact that the collapse of the housing bubble turned a nation of homeowners into a nation of renters. 

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