The first chart below updates our projection from 25 months ago (second chart below).

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Auto sales have been in a continuous recession for the past seven years. They never fully recovered from the last recession, and thus never entered an expansion stage, and they have been declining sharply for the past 22 months since their Jul ’05 peak (on a rolling 12-month cumulative basis).

The auto manufacturers obviously see further trouble ahead since GM and Ford began offering aggressive incentives late last month, with zero-percent financing for 36 months on some models to go along with additional cash-back deals. Toyota and Honda are offering higher discounts than last year, as marketplace competition heats up.

The path of their seven-year decline is a Supercycle ABC zigzag (down-up-down) pattern consistent with the associated mania and echo-mania in the stock market. Since cars and trucks are the most expensive durable goods for consumers, they are their biggest discretionary purchase. So naturally, they lead and verify the Supercycle Bear Market ABC pattern for the stock market that we have been repeatedly pointing out in different ways: http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/bronson/main.html 

The Supercycle ABC pattern is also economically confirmed by growth in GDP, and especially in the fixed investment portion of the GDP/NIPA, where business capital spending and housing (especially sales prices) are in actual decline. The ABC pattern also is revealed in employment and the growth rate of business profits, all of which we have reported in previous reports.

The third chart below shows the past 40 years of auto (unit) sales, adjusted for population growth since Dec 1980. Notice the past 12 months auto sales of 14.1 million units are at the same level as they were 23 years ago. Unit sales are a more reliable measure of real, or inflation-adjusted, auto sales since deflating nominal dollar sales with auto-specific price inflation, including various types of discounts and hedonic (quality) adjustments, is very problematic.

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The fourth chart below illustrates how the minus 2% threshold in annual growth rate of real dollar auto sales has been a good signal for recession in the overall economy. Essentially the same threshold is confirmed by our first chart (above) of unit auto sales.

When BEA reports the June data for trucks next week, we will send you (to receive them join our private e-mail list by clicking the link below) the first and third charts updated for the auto and truck data, but it certainly won’t show any improvement in the accelerating deterioration of the very predictable more severe second recession during the ongoing Supercycle Bear Market Period.

© 2007 Bob Bronson
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Bob Bronson
Bronson Capital Markets Research
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