Americans can’t afford their cars any more and Wall Street is worried

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/10/20/americans-cant-afford-cars-any-more-wall-street-worried/

27 comments
  1. Wall Street is not worried it’s some of the highest stock prices ever

  2. Simple actions: Higher wages, low interest rates, and damn it, lower the prices on new vehicles.

  3. Now you’re worried? What did you think would happen when the cost of everything raised exponentially? 

  4. Ohnoes!

    CEOs and investors and tech bros eek all the money from the regular peeps, and now the consumer is an endangered species and there’s no-one left to pump and fatten their pocketsizz!

    Who knew?

  5. I can afford one no problem, I just REFUSE to buy a car or anything during this regime, Made all my major purchase in Dec 24. Food, fuel, medicine only for the next 4 years.

  6. I grew up in a rural American West and go there frequently. Cars? Yes, problematic, I’m sure.

    But I see a whole lot of trucks out there that represent a very large percentage of the value entailed in the driver’s homes.

  7. Somehow they thought they could erase the entire middle class and then maintain the economy as usual.

    The next crash will be entirely of Wall Streets creation. The number of people living paycheck to paycheck has grown by an incredible amount and they are going to dry up non-essential spending across the board.

  8. The AI bubble has sent the stock market soaring and data center spending has hidden the true state of our economy. The Magnificent Seven stocks account for most of the stock market gains and all but Apple are neck deep in AI spending. A Harvard economist found that without that AI date center spending, our GDP growth in the first half of 2025 was 0.1%.

    Trump’s tariffs are further squeezing consumers when consumer spending is already stagnant and prices are rising. The AI bubble also sucks down power like my old Game Gear did with its six AAs leading to huge power bill increases.

    Add to all that, the Big Beautiful bill threatens 700 rural hospitals with closure over medicaid cuts while it is setting our insurance costs to skyrocket. SNAP cuts will further pinch poorer folks spending and could lead to independent grocery stores that rely on SNAP spending to keep their stores open shuttering.

    Our economy has been fucked for a while. The moment that AI bubble starts wobbling, everyone will finally realize it.

  9. Oh no! What are Americans going to live in??? (This is a complex joke about the sad reality that many people can’t afford a home and are forced to live in their cars because we live in a dystopian hellscape where we have more money and resources than ever in history and yet income inequality is insanely visible)

  10. Average price of a new car in America is now up to $52,183. That’s just insane.

  11. Good thing America has such great pedestrian infrastructure and public transit! America invested in 1 mode of transportation; cars. What could go wrong!?

  12. There’s a bubble that will burst sooner rather than later, and it won’t be pretty. There are a lot of people who’s debt is increasing and others who are dipping into their savings. Many people will blame it on immigrants and the previous administration, because that’s what they tend to do.

  13. When I was first buying a used car like 12 years ago, a lot of pretty junky but capable cars were like $600-$900. Now people are trying to sell scrap cars for $1k. Can’t find a usable car for anything less than $2.5k.

  14. Ha. We have seen this one before.

    > much of which has been sold on to financial institutions in the form of asset-backed securities (ABS).

    If you’ve bought a car from a dealer since COVID you’ll also know that you do NOT just offer to pay in cash and get discounts. They WANT to give you a loan, and not just to subprime borrowers with 10%+ APR, everyone. They get paid to generate ABS.

    Does anyone remember what happens when demand for the collateralized debt asset class outstrips demand for the underlying?

  15. I paid mine off last year, dealership immediately tried to convince me to trade it in for a new car…im gonna drive this car until the wheels fall off

  16. It’s almost like an economy built on inflating quarterly results coupled with massive c-suite incentives isn’t sustainable for individuals. Surely not a bubble!

  17. >The ***average price*** of a new car in the US has surged by 35pc since 2019 and surpassed $50,000 this year.

    >The ***average monthly paymen***t on a typical loan for a new car is now $761

    Are you fucking kidding me (bold / italics mine)?

  18. We are in desperate need for collapse and restructuring. I dont know how to adequately redistribute the $79B thats currently being held by the top 1% of of our population, but we should figure it out, and make it happen.

  19. Me and my 300k mile CRV praying to the car gods it makes it another 100k miles. 

  20. I mean, what did they expect to happen when they broke the middle class, turned the lower class into the extremely broke class, and push the people who were sitting on that line of being homeless into actual homelessness?

    More wealth has been transferred to the ultra wealthy since Trump has been president than has ever happened in American history before. We’re all going broke and chewing on peanuts while they sit around and grill steaks that are $400 apiece. When this whole thing comes crashing down, corporations have no one to blame with themselves. You cannot run a country like this, if you bleed your middle class dry, everything crashes down. No one can pay for your products, your businesses go out of business and then your left, wondering why your business went out of business.

  21. Can’t afford yer cars.

    Can’t afford yer houses.

    Can’t afford yer medicines.

    Can’t afford yer groceries.

    Somthin’s gotta give.

  22. The problem with capitalism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

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