The subprime car-lending industry -- charging exorbitant rates for car-loans to people least suited to afford them, enforced through orwellian technologies, obscuring the risk by spinning the debt into high-risk/high-yield bonds -- is collapsing.
The three most prominent lenders in the subprime auto sector shut down spectacularly and suddenly through bankruptcies and fraud investigations (and the bankrupt ones are said to have been fraudulent!). ...
This is one of the credit bubbles whose bursting the Wall Street Journal predicted, and while its absolute magnitude is smaller than the subprime housing bubble, and while cars are more liquid (and thus easier for creditors to sell and get some cash out of), it will have knock-on effects for car-makers, dealers, and the banks and PE firms most exposed to the sector -- to say nothing of the borrowers who depended on the subprime sector for work-related transport in a nation where underinvestment in public transit has turned the carless into economic roadkill.
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