Americans love their cars and trucks. And in July, they bought a whole lot of them. Chrysler and Ford each reported their July sales were up 6 percent from a year earlier, while General Motors notched a 12 percent rise, according to Wards Auto. Some foreign automakers notched even stronger gains, including 13 percent for Toyota and 16 percent for Honda.
In fact, the auto market has now completed its long slog back to pre-recession levels. Americans bought cars and trucks at a 15.6 million annual rate in July, a bit below June and about the level of December 2007, when the recession began, and up from a low of 9 million in early 2009.
It is an amazing comeback in many ways. There were more than 16 million vehicles sold each year in the middle of the last decade, and to many of us that looked like the artificial bubble. It was sustained, after all, by rising home prices (which made people feel wealthier, even if the rises were illusory), easy credit (so even people who probably shouldn’t have could get a car loan), and novel mortgage products that made it easy to borrow against a house to buy a car.
But with the economy still weak and unemployment still high, how is it that auto sales have returned to pre-recession levels? ...
