Followup

Mike Smitka

One quick point: if the underlying analysis of the previous post of a specific link between the housing bubble, the use of home equity lines and thence car sales is accurate, then we should see that showing up in differential behavior in low-bubble and high-bubble economies: areas with big bubbles should have had a greater car sales boom and a greater crunch (including repossessions). Of course empirically that could be difficult to identify, because the "bubble" areas (as I believe is very much the case, but have not checked) have higher unemployment and hence will have lower car sales and higher repossessions, independent of a finance link. Perhaps that can be done because only certain classes of credit histories showed a propensity to use home equity, whereas unemployment may hit both the conservative and the spendthrift alike. That's not an easy empirical task, closer to what might be needed for a serious PhD-level research project if not a multi-year PhD thesis project.

No More Clanging Clunkers, No More Sales

Mike Smitka

What, now that the clunkers program has clanged to a close? In a couple days we'll see what total August sales were like – I'm risking bytes of criticism writing now – but I'm afraid it will be back to business as normal. Afraid, because normal this year has been an SAAR of 10 million or less. The level of enthusiasm makes it clear that sales have been pulled forward; it'll be payback time. The problems run deeper: cars were affected by the bubble, and not just housing.
A recent NBER working paper by Atif Mian and Amir Sufi of the University of Chicago bolsters the argument that I've made in earliers notes. My analysis was based solely on an analysis of sales and scrappage data relative to the vehicle stock; they started out with data on 266,000 individuals in the Equifax credit rating database. (Don't worry – they couldn't actually look at individual records, but instead had to extract information from data that Equifax had already sanitized and then mildly aggregated.) But combined with data on geography and housing prices and demographics, they could paint a picture of where prices had gone up, areas where housing supply was "inelastic" so that shifts in demand showed up as higher prices rather than more construction. They could then look at who borrowed: not those with in places where prices moved little, but those who were in "hot" markets, and who started out with lower incomes and/or lower credit scores. And did they ever tap the equity; credit records made it clear that these people were also buying a lot of vehicles, vehicles they earlier had not been able to afford. But those same locations are ones where mortgage holders are now under water (see Federal Reserve data on credit conditions, illustrated by maps color-coded at the county level). They're losing their houses and their cars, not buying new ones. In other words, there was a bubble in the auto market as well, people buying on credit backed by unrealized capital gains.
That really is not news, though it makes for sobering and poignant stories (see the New York Times series on the Beth Court neighborhood in Moreno Valley, outside LA). But what Mian and Sufi show is that behavior didn't change much in the many urban areas where there was no run-up in housing prices (I'll append a graph I created from the Case Schiller real estate index that illustrates the contrast). In other words, the big boom in car sales came from the same people who were splurging on home renovations and vacations by pulling equity out of their houses. Well, that equity isn't there to the tune $1 trillion in California alone (data from an August 13th study by First American CoreLogic). In Nevada 45% of homeowners have negative equity of 25% or more of their mortgages; in California, 25%. These people aren't buying cars anytime soon. So while house prices may have bottomed out – and the recession ended – that doesn't mean the good times will roll again.
That's not only because of all the people who lost everything (or soon will, given that 5% of the labor force has now been unemployed for over 27 weeks, and another 2% for 15-26 weeks). On average the rest of us are worried. State and local governments are only now cutting their budgets; commercial real estate hasn't hit bottom yet. There are a lot of pink slips yet to be distributed. So there's no reason to think those of us who were more conservative in our habits are suddenly going to loosen pursestrings that long have been tight. Let's be honest with ourselves; if we're thrifty, it's by necessity: home equity is what we have from paying down the mortgage, not because the spot of mother earth we occupy was suddenly worth megabucks

The graphs below look at housing prices relative to the CPI index, real GDP and nominal GDP. One focuses on four of the metropolitan areas with the greatest run-up in prices, a couple of which have come back to earth, and then some. The other highlights cities where there was comparatively little change. I left the scale the same on both, which results in a lot of blank space on the second one, plus it's hard to read because the graphs lie more or less on top of each other. Which is the point it is meant to illustrate.

Here's a link to a powerpoint from a talk I gave yesterday (Aug 25, 2009) that includes additional material.

Click to enlarge!

Click to enlarge!

---

Japan's Headlines: China not Clunkers

Mike Smitka

The top headline in the Nikkei today (Aug 7th) was neither their recession, nor their pending general election (and the potential change of government). It was July car sales in China, up 64% from from 2008 to roughly 1.1 million units. That's above the clunker-driven 1.0 million level in the US, and (as the percentage increase suggests) out of synch with sales doldrums during the past couple summers.
Part of the reason is that, despite the American perception of China as an economy dominated by exports, it's a country the size of the continental US, and that huge domestic expanse is peopled by 1.3 billion would-be consumers. The Chinese government is determined that they will be consumers. To make that happen, the government is providing plenty of domestic stimulus, unhindered (at least in comparative terms) by domestic banking problems, and with little of the pointless tax cuts and other fluff that bolstered the price tag of the "stimulus" package passed in the US. The ongoing construction of a national highway system provides plenty of room to speed things up (reversing the policy stance of a year ago, when the fear was inflation).
There are also vehicle-specific policies with bigger environmental implications than the US program that gets rid of a few seldom-driven¹ "clunkers." Their tax breaks and and scrappage incentives (that include provisions to help rid rural roads of smoke-belching 3-wheelers), was implemented in a timely manner in January 2009. The focus is small vehicles, those with under 1600cc engines, with no loopholes to subsidize the purchase of trucks (unlike the US "clunkers" program). And if you visit Shanghai or Suzhou, while you'll find the roads filled with scooters and motorized bikes, the noise level is a fraction of what it used to be: they're electric, driven by batteries. The garages of condos include outlets to plug them in at night, enough to power the daily commute. But diesel fuel in China is still sulfur-laden, so the next-best alternative, a clean-diesel powered vehicle, is not yet an option there -- as was the case until two years ago in the US. So China can't (yet) follow the European option of small, clean and very-long-lived diesel powered cars.
Now the China market is profitable for the moment, and important to global firms. GM has actually shifted its international operations HQ to Shanghai, anticipating its sales there to top 1 million units in the near future; VW already sells over 1.0 million units a year. Accordingly everyone is pouring on capacity and dealers.
This may be a "bubble" of sorts. Already the shift towards smaller vehicles makes it less of a gold mine than a year ago on a per-vehicle basis. Meanwhile, the number of players is mind-boggling: not only are all of the major international players in the market (VW and GM have the top two spots) but there are still 80 local players. Yes, 80 -- because local governments support their "favorite son" firms. If you visit China, watch how the make of taxis varies as you move from city to city. The government is pushing for consolidation, and a couple of the bigger players have bought up a couple small ones. Others have quietly exited. But consolidation has been policy for years and years, and still there are 80 firms! Unless push comes to shove, Beijing has all too little clout at the local level, and this is just one example.
Lots of players ultimately means little profit. GM, Toyota and their rivals are jointly placing a big bet that that does not happen until they've been able to recoup their investment. However, that's a game of "chicken" and at the moment no one wants to blink and ease off on the throttle. I smell a bloodbath in the making, red ink puddled all over balance sheets. That may be 3 years away, but it will happen.
Meanwhile lots of incumbents remain due to (local) government largesse. A couple will turn out to have been well run and innovative, though at present they are still woefully lacking in engineering sophistication. In the background Beijing -- not the locals -- is making a big push towards electric vehicles; ditto battery technology. So a few local firms are likely to focus on electric vehicles (not nightmarishly complex hybrids), and in a market where drivers don't expect to go hundreds of kilometers at a stretch, there will be a local market (unlike in the US). The transition in drivetrain technologies may allow a couple global players to emerge out of the current plethora of small, high-cost producers.
Note that this has strong parallels with the Japanese case. There government policy also pushed for consolidation, and it also failed to accomplish that. Now the early post-WWII market did have about 30 players, and without local government support [Japan's is not a decentralized political system] or other deep pockets half of them soon exited; Toyota and Nissan both picked up with an extra factory or two in the process. The bottom line however was a market with a dozen firms, no dominant firm or even a "Big Three" that could mute competition. In Japan, it was improve efficiency or fail, and in the end that gave birth to Honda and Toyota.² Japan's auto industry succeeded because industrial policy failed; the same, I suspect, will prove the case in China.³
Notes
1. Unfortunately the mandatory "CARS" survey that is part of the US "clunkers" program doesn't ask how many vehicles were owned. It does ask how many miles were driven the previous year -- as far as I can tell, no data from that question are yet available. Not surprising: most dealers haven't been able to get their "clunker" deals approved, much less gotten a check.
2. There are of course other Japanese firms, but only Honda, Toyota and Suzuki remain autonomous. Nissan is controlled by Renault, Mazda is de facto controlled by Ford, Fuso is owned by Daimler, Nissan Diesel by Volvo Truck, Toyota has purchased Hino and Daihatsu outright and has a large stake in Subaru/Fuji Heavy and Isuzu, and MMC has survived through the inexplicable largesse of its creditors and of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.
3. I have only cursory knowledge of India. In contrast, I began studying about China in 1971, and while I ultimately became a Japan expert (more practical at the time), I've followed (and taught a course on) the Chinese economy for over 20 years, and have visited the country repeatedly.