Car dealers dropping like flies

[Barklessdog]

For the first time I can remember, new car dealers are dropping like flies. 4 dealers near me, all American cars closed up.

I guess they can't give anyone a car with bad credit anymore.

[rahock]

Yep,
I'm in the Detroit burbs and there are a few recently vacated lots in the hood. Not to mention the Oldsmobile dealers that are now selling Subarus and Hyundias

Rick

[Lightyear]

One of the monster Chevy dealers here in Houston is closing up - or so I heard today.  This was one of those always on sale scream at you places.  I won't miss their commercials.

[eb2]

My buddy just bailed out of selling cars recently, and his outlook on the whole biz was pretty bleak for a number of reasons.  Among the things he weighed when making the switch were the credit biz, the fact that Ford was bailing out on leases ( a really bad sign) and the fact that dealers are in competition with used cars that are built to last more than ever, and the average guy can sell a used car via the net without trading them in - which the dealers pay less than ever for.  The car companies are not making anything on the cars - they need to dump them.  It is probably going to boil down to something like Toyota, Ford and a smaller GM left standing, with fewer cars produced and the old school large lot dealerships gone forever.  Kind of like everything else in our brave new world.

[Dave W]

One of the monster Chevy dealers here in Houston is closing up - or so I heard today.  This was one of those always on sale scream at you places.  I won't miss their commercials.

They're not just in Houston. Bill Heard is based in Georgia and has (or had) the largest chain of Chevy dealers in the country. He had stores elsewhere in the South and in Las Vegas. The story I saw said 3500 employees will be jobless by tomorrow.

[godofthunder]

 Don't look now but the S@#t is about to hit the fan. Hang on tight bruthas.

[Barklessdog]

I guy who I work out with said the bank froze his home equity account he was using to put his kid through collage - his house lost so much value his loan became a risk I guess. Surprise!

He said he had it paid to zero as well.

What I do not understand is all of a sudden we need to save the economy this week, right now?

who the hell was watching it the last 8 years?



In nature there is neither rewards or punishments, but only consequences

[Barklessdog]

The ones who are really going to be hurt if we do not do the bail out are all the rich bastards who have been raping America through lobbyist and their own personal interests.

It should be like in China or India where they kill executives who do what they have done here. Instead they get nice retirement packages & stock options even they screwed the company or a nice bail out by us, the tax payers.

Leave business alone, thats what they keep telling us, leave them to sink in their own shit.

The people at my wife's work are cashing their money out of the bank and keeping it at home.

[godofthunder]

 Right now I am spending NOTHING. I have even returned some items that arrived last week.

[godofthunder]

 Right now we have conditions for the perfect storm, our national debt is astronomical. Our economy is in free fall, Russia is acting as a aggressor, missile defense systems being depolyed in Poland and Checkoslovakia, North Korea's leader ship is adrift, our forces spread so thin you can see through it. Manufacturing capability reduced to a trickle. The smell of blood is in the water, I would not be a bit surprised if China was goading Russia to invade Georgia and then if we deploy missile defense to invade it's former soviet era countries. I am having a had time sleeping these days.

[Barklessdog]

Our old companies investor kept saying that wait till you live through a depression, like he did. "Don't kid you're self that it's always going to be good times in the US".

[Chris P.]

It's a bad time, but like during the cold war I don't think anyone dares to invade a big country or use certain weapons.

[godofthunder]

 Russia has already show it is willing to invade another country. Lets see what they do when we put missiles in Poland and Chechoslovakia.

[Pilgrim]

This whole situation just demonstrates how stupid businesses can become when they have a chance to make money. It SHOULD have occurred to reputable lenders that they were making stupid loans - ARM loans which were designed to explode in 5 years when the interest went up - to people who weren't going to be able to pay the loan when the interest increased.

They made the incredibly stupid assumption that real estate would never stop increasing in value...and that if people had to default on the loans, someone else would buy the homes.  And they made this assumption right during and after the dot-com bust.

The market does NOT have the answer for everything. Left without regulation, it gets stupid and this time it stampeded right off a cliff.

[Dave W]

It's not so much about the loans; there have always been higher risk loans that carried higher interest rates because they defaulted more often. It's about the way the loans were deliberately misvalued. All of these so-called instruments were packaged, resold and overvalued and wound up in some cases valued at more than 30 times the actual original commitment, and that's before payments on the original commitment had even started!

I don't want to get into a political discussion about the need for more or less regulation. To my mind this is fraud, plain and simple. These are giant Ponzi schemes, and like all Ponzi schemes, they depend on the greed of the investors as well as the fraudulent intent of the people who run them. All the people involved knew these loans weren't worth their face value because of the risk, but instead of appraising them honestly, they deliberately did the opposite in the hopes that the schemes would continue to draw in new suckers.