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A growing percentage of Americans with auto loans are struggling to make their monthly payments. Subprime borrowers in particular are feeling the impact of higher prices for both new and used vehicles. The rise in delinquencies also follows the end of loan-accommodation programs set up during the pandemic. With inflation cutting into the budgets of Americans, a growing percentage of people with auto loans are struggling to make their monthly payments. TransUnion, which tracks more than 81 million auto loans in the U.S., said Tuesday the percentage of loans that are at least 60 days delinquent hit 1.65% in the...

Bank Australia recently announced that it will stop granting loans for new fossil fuel cars from 2025 forward to force more people to purchase electric vehicles. Justifying the bank’s move, its chief impact officer proclaimed, “We think that the responsible thing for us to do … is to ensure that our vehicle lending doesn’t lock our customers in to higher carbon emissions and increasingly expensive running costs in the years ahead.” But is making it more difficult for hard-working men and women to obtain affordable vehicles that run on reliable energy really the “responsible thing” to do? That’s exactly the...

Wells Fargo, one of the biggest lenders for new and used car purchases in the U.S., sent letters to hundreds of independent auto dealerships last month telling them that the San Francisco-based company was dropping them as a customer, according to people with knowledge of the situation. A Wells Fargo spokeswoman confirmed that the bank, which only makes auto loans through car dealerships, will no longer accept loan applications from most independent shops. Independent dealerships typically sell used cars, unlike franchise dealerships that focus on new vehicles from specific manufacturers. The bank had “an obligation to review our business practices...

Joyce Parks was struggling to afford her Kia Soul when, she says, the dealership where she had bought it pitched her an unconventional idea: Stop making the payments. Ms. Parks, 63, says employees told her that she couldn’t trade in the Soul, but that she could buy another car. To get rid of the Soul, the dealership told her, she should have the lender repossess it, Ms. Parks said. The trade-in, where a buyer hands a car back to a dealership and uses it as credit toward another one, is often a crucial step in car buying. But some dealerships...

Robert Loehr’s dealership is hanging in just fine, much like Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV’s sales did last quarter. But just as investors doubt the U.S. car market can sustain near-record results for much longer, the Georgia retailer is apprehensive about a key issue: sticker shock. “Prices are crazy on cars nowadays -- all of them,” said Loehr, who sells Jeeps, Rams and other Fiat Chrysler models from a showroom northwest of Atlanta and has been in the business for 35 years. “They’re crazy to me, and I do it every single day, all day long.” New Jeep Gladiators -- the...

Walk into an auto dealership these days and you might walk out with a seven-year car loan. That means monthly payments that last well past when the brake pads give out and potentially beyond when the car gets traded in for a new one. About a third of auto loans for new vehicles taken in the first half of 2019 had terms of longer than six years, according to credit-reporting firm Experian PLC. A decade ago, that number was less than 10%.

There is a lot of talk out there about the auto-loan market right now. Hedge fund manager Jim Chanos has said the auto-lending market should "scare the heck out of everybody," while the auto-lending practices of some used-car dealerships has been given the John Oliver treatment on TV. It's a topic we've been paying attention to as well. In a presentation in September at the Barclays Financial Services Conference, Gordon Smith, the chief executive for consumer and community banking at JPMorgan, set out some eye-opening statistics on the market. Now the New York Federal Reserve is taking a closer look...

New car loans have become the new hot product and Wall Street, not car-loving Americans, is the real market. The growth of student loan debt has received no shortage of attention from politicians and the media in recent years, making it one of the top economic anxieties in post-mortgage-meltdown America. Behind the front-page investigations and populist political platforms, the numbers are indisputably chilling: student loan balances have surged from less than $18,000 per person to $25,000 per person in the ten years since 2005. But another class of debt is also growing at troubling rates without attracting anywhere near the...

More than a quarter of car buyers still owed an average of $4,257 more than their vehicles were worth. Unlike a home, which can increase in value, a new car loses 11 percent of its value on average the minute it’s driven off the dealership’s lot. After five years of depreciation, the same car has lost two-thirds of its value and is typically worth just 37 percent of its original purchase price. The problem is that many car loans now exceed five years. Although the longer loans mean lower monthly payments, they leave many owners with negative equity in a...

The days when a bare-bones "stripper" car came with vinyl seats, rubber floor mats and no air conditioning are long gone. Today, convenience and cold air come standard for all models, along with a long list of niceties that were once the sole domain of the loaded vehicle. A base Chevy Spark, as one example, offers aluminum wheels, ten standard airbags, power windows — even six months of OnStar service, in case you lock your keys in the car. On the surface, the new car market is offering better values than ever. There is just one small problem with nearly...

Another month, another confirmation that when it comes to the US consumer, it is all about student debt (and to a lesser extent, car loans). Moments ago the Fed reported that consumer credit number for March: at $17.5 billion, it not only blew out the expectation of a $15.5 billion increase (although when one adds last month's $3.5 billion downward revision to $13.0 billion the two month total actually missed), but was the highest monthly increase since February 2013. That's the good news.  The bad news was once again in the composition: of this $17.5 billion $16.4 billion was...

The Biggest Financial Scandal In History?Michael SnyderJuly 5, 2012 We always knew that the financial markets were rigged, but this is getting ridiculous. It is now being alleged that 20 major banks have been systematically fixing global interest rates for years. Barclays has already been fined hundreds of millions of dollars for manipulating Libor (the London Inter Bank Offered Rate). But Barclays says that a whole bunch of other banks were doing this too. This is shaping up to be the biggest financial scandal in history, and criminal investigations have been launched on both sides of the Atlantic. What those...

Washington – The Obama administration said Wednesday that the government will lose about $14 billion in taxpayer funds from the bailout of the U.S. auto industry. In a report from the president's National Economic Council, officials said that figure is down from the 60 percent the Treasury Department originally estimated the government would lose following its $80 billion bailout of Chrysler and General Motors in 2009. The report's release coincides with the administration's efforts to tout the bailout's role in the revitalization of the U.S. auto industry after last week's announcement that Chrysler is repaying $5.9 billion in U.S.

(Reuters) - Ally Financial Inc, the United States' largest maker of car loans, hopes that people have forgotten the time when "subprime" became a synonym for "disaster." Ally, once known as GMAC Financial Services, is getting ready to go public this year, and is making the case that subprime loans for used car buyers are not about to produce the same results that they did in the housing market a few years ago -- a near-collapse of the financial system. Auto loans performed relatively well during the downturn, and demand for cars is up, so auto lending is one of...

The scuttlebutt: banks still willing to make new car loans are more so when the make is foreign. The meme has been traveling around for a while by net, got an unsupported mention on NPR this week and spurred me into making a few phone calls. Off the record, wink-wink, nudge, nudge, it’s easy to get you bought on a car from a company not headquartered in Detroit. In other words, the gangrene of bankruptcy has already set in.

Car Loans Have Longer Terms Than Ever By ROBERT SCHOENBERGERAmericans today take nearly two years longer to pay off car loans than people did 30 years ago — a trend that has helped bury consumers in debt and automakers in deficits. A typical car loan now lasts five years, and many stretch to seven, data from the Federal Reserve show. And the length will only go up. Toyota in January announced it would offer seven-year terms on some loans. Analysts said eight-year offerings are rare but growing in popularity. "Just a few years ago, some banks didn't even offer a...