Vehicle Sales Up 13%, Ford Leads with 43% Jump
The table above (click to enlarge) shows February U.S. vehicle sales (data here), ranked by the percentage change from February of last year. Overall sales in February were up 13.3% compared to last year (91,320 more vehicles were sold last month compared to February 2009), and Ford led the industry with a 43.4% increase, and capturing almost half (43,000 vehicles) of the 91,320 unit increase from last February.
9 Comments:
Once more the folks who think that we had a lot more than a traditional financial panic have difficuties with the data. If you read the book 1907 about the last panic (The depression was a much longer lasting event) You see that a panic lasts until someone takes control (JPMorgan the banker in that case) What we had in 2008 was a panic in the money market fund industry and among banks. So we had a recession with a panic on top of it, (just like 1907).
Well as a non-consenting stock holder in Government Motors (a.k.a. a taxpayer) I can almost feel a certain amount of pride in how the GM bondholders got hosed for the greater good of the UAW...
this is somewhat less impressive if you consider that 2008 sales were 1.1176 million. sales dropped 487k cars from 2008-9, a 41% drop. a recovery of 91k cars in 2009 only makes up 18% of the loss from the prior year.
that's not a terribly robust recovery especially given that car purchases are heavily influenced by the availability of financing which was very hard to come by in feb 2009.
recovering slightly more than 1/6 of the loss in sales over a year doesn't sound terribly "v" shaped to me...
I'd like to believe this is just a panic Lyle, but we've got a huge amount of structural debt; a congress hell bent on regulating anything that moves, and most of the things that can't; special interests who see opportunities in buddying up with the government; and a president who's little more than a panderer.
oh, and I'm not a Ford fan, but YAY! non state-owned car companies!
The issue is that a lot of the problems cited about deficits etc are long term problems, it would have led to a nasty recession, but then you layer a panic on top. In 1907 the long term trigger was the 1906 earthquake which took a bunch of money out of the economy, leaving it less stable. All the issues cited destablized the economy making it more subject to shocks, and then the Money Market Fund Reserve Fund was the precipitating event for a run/panic. (We have made progress however you no longer have to que up at the bank, you can now do it online.) So we will return as many have noted to a severe recession from the situation of Sept 2008-March 2009.
Then we have to decide we will no longer be the worlds policeman.
Stop the policy of being the worlds bully that you must behave or we will beat you up bullies eventually loose.
misterjosh:
That is structured and leveraged debt. Highly leveraged.
Remember, Warren Buffet called derivatives and leveraged debt, "financial weapons of mass destruction."
We nearly got destroyed.
X - 40% = Y
Y + 40% << X
Suzuki sold LESS cars than Porsche?! How soon before Suzuki pulls out of the US auto market?
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