A few years ago, it was speculated on this board that all of the long-term (84-96 month) loans that auto buyers were using to buy new cars at artificially low interest rates used by the Obama "administration" in the absence of a real economic policy would create a bubble in the auto industry and possibly lead to a recession.
That day is getting closer, as Avis (last week) and Hertz (today) reported very bad earnings. Even though these are car rental companies, they make a lot of their money on used car sales, selling cars once they hit a certain mileage level. When the numbers are tallied, Avis and Hertz spent a combined $110 billion on new car purchases since 2010, and sold those cars for $85 billion. This shortfall of $25 billion is covered by their rental business, but it's still a $25 billion shortfall. Once car prices go lower due to a flood of repossessions on the market, the $85 billion number will be lower. Keep in mind that the combined market capitalization of both companies combined is only ~ $4 billion. It won't take much more to wipe out their equity.
Also, Capital One Financial recently reported that they had to put over 5% into reserves for bad loans, mostly to democrats who bought cars, but couldn't make the payments.
Seriously though, this has the potential to be a problem for the economy if it gets worse, and it probably will. Cheap used cars means that new car sales have more competition than usual. This feeds back into the big auto companies, their suppliers, and suppliers to the suppliers.
This is what the deadly combination of slow growth and artificially low interest rates have on an economy, over the long term. The game works very well initially, until things fall apart. All the more reason why, even though Trump is easy for democrats to hate, they should root for him to get things moving. After all, nobody wants "the Trump economy to hit you with a 20% decrease for two years!"
