Ben Eisen
speaker
1,467 appearances
35 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2017
last heard Nov 2024
Ben Eisen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So you have all of that.
But at the same time,
You have incomes that have not risen to match.
So this discrepancy has formed, and basically that's getting filled with debt.
Yeah, I mean, one thing that we've been reporting on here at the Journal for the whole year is just this idea that
It is tougher to be in the middle class these days.
Incomes may be rising for the top 1% very rapidly, but they are not for the middle class.
And just hanging on to what's considered a middle class lifestyle, buying a Honda Accord new at the dealership is just a lot more difficult than it used to be.
And when we look at what's happening at the auto dealership, it really provides a window into how people are using debt in order to kind of maintain that middle class lifestyle that is so hard to keep.
I mean, the question is really unanswered at the moment.
I think there's a lot more debt than there used to be, record amounts of it.
But at the same time, when you talk to folks in the industry, they say that people always pay their car loans.
It's the first payment they make because they need their cars to get to work.
And during the financial crisis, they kept paying their car loans even after they stopped paying their mortgages.
The question is, has that changed?
You have a lot more auto debt, and people are sort of in these cycles of perpetual debt tied to their cars.
And so when you think about it, in some ways, it's more like a long-term rental than it is a car if you're kind of never done paying for it, right?
And does that change the psychology of whether people will ultimately pay if times get tough?
You know, these are all questions that we don't really know the answers to, but it's something people are really watching very closely.
Yeah.
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