A car market crash of epic proportions is already in motion, according to new data released by Manheim Market Insights and Cox Automotive. In June, car prices faced a record drop, marking the end of two years of hefty increases. Used vehicles saw the biggest monthly declines since the pandemic boom, while new cars are about to plummet in value due to an oversupply crisis that is shaking the US auto market.
Still, higher interest rates are making monthly car payments far more expensive than they were just a year ago, and many Americans who bought a vehicle in the past couple of years, and are now seeing its cost fall off a cliff, are already underwater on their loans, which indicates that a wave of financial turmoil is right ahead.
From May to June, wholesale used vehicle prices declined by a record 4.2 percent, according to Manheim Market Insights. More notably, the Manheim Used Vehicle Value Index, a closely watched measure of prices, plunged 10.3 percent year-over-year in June. Compared to one year ago, prices for pickups and vans went down by 6.6 percent and 8.5 percent, respectively. Sports cars were the worst off, falling 14.8 percent in prices compared to last year, while compact cars and midsize cars each dropped by more than 12 percent from June 2022.
Looking ahead, the three strongest predictors of used car prices – new vehicle inventories, new vehicle incentives, and the new-versus-used price differential – all point to a significant crash, the firm notes. In fact, Goldman Sachs analysts lowered their user car inflation forecast by 4 percent to -11 percent, which means that the bank is assuming that used car prices are going to face a 14 percent downside from current levels by the end of the third quarter. That would result in an almost 25 percent crash in a span of just six months, and an oversupply crisis in the new car market could bring the price of used cars even lower before the end of the year.
Right now, the market for new cars is in a strange state. UBS analysts argue that a price war is on the horizon with dealers duking it out by dropping new car prices. In May, new-vehicle inventory reached its highest level in two years, with a notable increase from the previous month. Charlie Chesbrough, Cox Automotive’s senior economist. says that the new car market will continue to see weakening demand due to worsening economic indicators, and the increase in supply will force many dealerships and automakers to start offering discounts.
At the same time, the share of new auto loans with monthly payments exceeding $1,000 has hit a new record as borrowing costs continue to rise. Consumers are taking on too much auto debt, which could have catastrophic consequences during the recession. The latest number available on the average negative equity value of auto trade-ins was $5,341 in Q4 2022, a 29 percent jump from the previous year.
The number of vehicle sales that involved a trade-in with negative equity also climbed by 17 percent over the same period. The negative equity trend could accelerate even further as vehicle prices continue to drop. In other words, conditions for borrowers will become even tougher before the market stabilizes. Car prices still have a lot of room to fall, and during that process, countless Americans may find themselves buried in negative equity.
Article and video cross-posted from Epic Economist.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
The car industry flourished when Henry Ford made cars people could afford.
I tried to buy a mint 2016 Dodge Challenger in 2022 as a gift to my brother in law. The car was 6 years old, was a Dodge and I offered the guy 17,000 dollars for it and I can’t believe I offered that much. But it was a clean car. He wanted 30,000 dollars for it. More than it cost new. HE SOLD IT FOR THAT! Somebody actually bought it for that. I’ll bet he’s pretty sick about it now. DUH?
Yep, stupid is as stupid does. America is not going to go electric, BECAUSE THE GRID CANNOT HANDLE IT AND THERE ARE NO PLANS TO REPLACE ENERGY PRODUCERS. A prime example is the San-Onofre nuclear power plant north of San Diego, which shut down some years back and no one bothered to take into account that it needed a replacement, so now we must purchase our power off the grid which must be transmitted many hundreds of miles which we also pay a fee for over and above the cost of electricity.
I have been tracking SDG&E’s monthly charges for the last seven and half years, and it has incrementally increased our cost substantially. over the last two and a half years ever since Biden shut down our energy supply it has gone up so high that many cannot afford to use their Air Conditioners or even charge their EVs.
Remember my friends that there is no way in hell that Wind, Solar, and hydroelectric can take the place of the power-packed Fosil Fuels we have used for the last 100 plus years. Wind and Solar are especially troublesome because of the need to recycle their materials at the end of their lives. You will pay handsomely for that privilege.
Total cost accounting is what is needed during the analysis. Do you have any idea what it is going to cost to recycle your dead solar panels? AND, how about those dead batteries in your Electric vehicles when that overly expensive battery pack goes dead. None of this was thought out by those handling Joe Biden.
And lastly, you must ask yourselves; WHO is manipulating the WEF and others to push this 2030 agenda on us? we are now at a crossroad of having to accept that we are not alone and this has become a fight for the resources our earth contains. HUMANS ARE BEING EMOTIONALLY TERRAFORMED SUCH THAT WE ARE BEING MANIPULATED TO KILL OURSELVES OFF, SO NO INVASION IS NEEDED TO COME IN AND STEAL WHAT WE BELIEVE IS OURS. You must come to understand that humanity is under attack, AND IT TIME TO WAKE UP !!!
How do you take out a car loan that isnt underwater from the moment you drive the car off the lot?
That’s non-sensical. A car doesnt gain value over its lifetime. (with the noted exception of collector/antique)
You buy used (>=2 years old), and make a large down payment. Most of the depreciation takes place in the first two years.
Didn’t have $ to put down on used Chevy Equinox which was 2 years old and only had 22k on it. Sale price was $28,700k had to finance entire car no $ down – payments for 72 months are $550 per month but has 4 year bumper to bumper 80k mile warranty – my sons car – had to co-sign & when all is done will have paid over $40k for car but son works making payments and it is a clean car. If I could have waited a little longer would have been great – this vehicle was coming off a lease
I just sold my 2020 Equinox with 15k miles on it at the end of the lease a month ago for $26,500 in near perfect condition. I came out ahead about 3k. Looks like I sold it just in time. The dealer marked it up to $30,500. I really wanted to get another one on lease but the terms were very unfavorable so I bought a low mileage used car instead. Saved me a lot of money.