The US Automobile Market after the "Great Recession": Back to Business as Usual or Birth of a New Industry?
Résumé
This chapter will analyse the contradictory tendencies of the US economy and automobile market after the Great Recession. The first part comes back to the analysis of the Great Recession to see how much it was the consequence of an unsustainable growth regime, whereby a decreasing labour income share, coupled with growing social inequalities, have led US households to take on even more debt to maintain their consumption pattern. This growth regime has modelled car demand and car financing in a way that parallels the housing market. In a second part, we analyse the rebound of the automobile market to see why there are many reasons to think that it will be short-lived. The fundamental reason is that the US growth regime has not changed. Other important reasons are more structural: the changing demographics, consumption pattern, gas prices, and the absence of breakthrough innovation in alternative fuel cars likely to reduce dramatically the cost of motoring when it is most needed.
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