A great quote from that article from our friends in Tennessee. People aren’t buying cars because their brains hurt from thinking about local politics. Good grief…
Grant Law of Newton Chevrolet in Chattanooga, Tenn., says showroom traffic has been a little slower than he would like. He thinks it might be related to the tight political race in the state between Rep. Harold Ford (news, bio, voting record) (D) and Republican Bob Corker, a former mayor of Chattanooga. “It’s consuming a lot of folks’ minds,” he says.
Edit: Roubini has an update from his post from yesterday.
“Tuesday Update: This morning data on consumer confidence, the Chicago PMI only reinforce my point that Q4 is headed to be much worse than Q3. And given the mismeasurement of motor vehicle contribution to GDP in Q3 the payback will come in Q4 as Ford and the other Big Three are slashing production. The housing and consumer durable recession is now becoming an auto recession and manufacturing recession too. And we are not even yet into a formal economy-wide recession that I do forecast to start in Q1 or Q2 of 2007″.
I think GDP goes negative and remains flat the entire year. I don’t see an uptick until ’08, when a lot of the housing shake up has occured, and the elections are upon us…
I check out CL every few days. I see the same overpriced people on there trying to sell their places. A lot of broker/realtor/debtors trying to unload their speculation investments.
Zillow in Southern California is highly inaccurate. I can look at 2 different neighborhoods of regular tract homes that are a few blocks from me, and show you houses that are next door to each other with Zestimates that span a $600,000 and $300,000 price difference in identical homes…
The run up in housing prices was not the result of people with high incomes who could afford these outrageous prices. It was the people with low incomes who could not afford them, and were only able to get into these homes with mortgage fraud…
