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    The Car Market 'Is Insane': Dealers Can't Keep Up With Demand

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    Rick Ricart is expecting nearly 40 Kia Telluride sport utility vehicles to arrive at his family’s dealership near Columbus, Ohio, over the next three weeks. Most will be on his lot for just a few hours.“They’re all sold,” Mr. Ricart said. “Customers have either signed the papers or have a deposit on them. The market is insane right now.”In showrooms across the country, Americans are buying most makes and models almost as fast as they can be made or resold. The frenzy for new and used vehicles is being fed by two related forces: Automakers are struggling to increase production because of a shortage of computer chips caused in large part by the pandemic. And a strong economic recovery, low interest rates, high savings and government stimulus payments have boosted demand.The combination has left dealers and individuals struggling to get their hands on vehicles. Some dealers are calling and emailing former customers offering to buy back cars they sold a year or two earlier because demand for used vehicles is as strong as it is for new cars, if not stronger. Used car prices are up about 45 percent over the past year, according to government data published this week. New car and truck prices are up about 5 percent over the past year.Those price increases have fed a debate in Washington about whether President Biden’s policies, particularly the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan he signed in March, are responsible for the sharp rise in inflation. The government said this week that consumer prices across the economy rose 5.4 percent in the last year through June.Republican lawmakers have argued that the March legislation is overheating the economy and are citing the rise in prices to oppose additional government spending. But Biden administration officials have pointed out that temporary supply shortages are largely responsible for the surge in prices of cars and other goods.Government stimulus may have helped some consumers, but it is hard to say how much. Several large forces are at play.The chip shortage, for example, is affecting automakers all over the world and is not directly related to U.S. policies. Industry officials blame limited production capacity for semiconductors and pandemic-related disruptions in supply and demand for the shortage.To make the most of limited chip supplies, General Motors has temporarily done away with certain features in some models, like stop-start systems that automatically turn off engines when cars stop for, say, a traffic light. And the French carmaker Peugeot has replaced digital speedometers with analog ones in some cars.Rental car companies that sold off thousands of cars during the pandemic to survive are now in the market to buy cars and trucks. They want to take advantage of a summer travel boom that has driven up rental rates to several hundred dollars a day in some places.“The industry has had strikes and material shortages before that have left us short of inventory, but I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Mark Scarpelli, the owner of two Chevrolet dealerships near Chicago. “Never, never, never.”His dealerships normally have 600 to 700 cars in stock. Now, he has about 50. Once or twice a week, a truck arrives with five or 10 vehicles. The cars disappear quickly because of customer waiting lists, Mr. Scarpelli said.Industry executives said the last time demand and supply were this out of sync was most likely after the end of World War II, when U.S. auto plants returned to making cars after years of churning out tanks and planes.Dealers said virtually everything was selling, from luxury vehicles and sports cars that cost more than $100,000 to basic used cars that many parents buy for teenagers.Even though the unemployment rate is still higher than before the pandemic, many people have money to spend. Government payments have helped lots of people, but many Americans, kept from vacationing or eating out, saved money. Financing cars is also relatively cheap — at least for people with good credit. Some automakers like Toyota, which has been less affected by the chip shortage than others, are advertising zero-interest loans on some cars.Mr. Ricart’s family businesses include a custom shop that sells high-end, special-edition trucks and sports cars. “We had a $125,000 Shelby pickup, and I said, ‘Who’s going to buy that?’” he recalled. “The next day it was gone. There’s so much free cash in the market. People are paying full price, even for the most expensive vehicles we have.”Buyers often have to take vehicles that don’t meet their specifications, and move fast when they find one close enough.Gary Werle, a retiree in Lake Worth, Fla., recently traded in a 2017 Buick Encore for a 2021 version, drawn by its safety features such as blind-spot monitoring and automatic braking. “I’m 80, and I thought it would be good to have those,” he said.On Memorial Day, his dealer called, and Mr. Werle didn’t hesitate. “I was at a party and left to buy the car,” he said. “I’d heard about the shortages, so I wasn’t sure the car would be there the next day.”Dealers are selling fewer vehicles, but their profits are up a lot. That’s a huge change from the spring of 2020, when most dealerships shut down for roughly two months and they had to lay off workers to survive.“The strong demand from consumers paired with a lack of supply from the manufacturers has created a gusher of profits for dealers,” said Alan Haig, president of Haig Partners, an automotive consultant.Now, dealers typically dictate the price of new or used cars. New cars typically sell for the manufacturer’s suggested retail price or, in some cases, thousands of dollars more for models in very high demand. Haggling over used cars is a distant memory.“There’s not a lot of negotiating that goes on right now on price,” said Wes Lutz, owner of Extreme Dodge in Jackson, Mich.Some customers have balked at paying top dollar for new cars and have opted to make do with older vehicles. That has increased demand for parts and service, one of the most profitable businesses for car dealers. Many dealers have extended repair-shop hours. Mr. Ricart said he had some repair technicians putting in 10- or 12-hour days three or four days in a row before taking a few days off.Of course, the shortage of cars will end, but it isn’t clear when.As Covid-19 cases and deaths rose last spring, automakers shut down plants across North America from late March until mid-May. Since their plants were down and they expected sales to come back slowly, they ordered fewer semiconductors, the tiny brains that control engines, transmissions, touch screens, and many other components of modern cars and trucks.At the same time, consumers confined to their homes began buying laptops, smartphones and game consoles, which increased demand for chips from companies that make those devices. When automakers restarted their plants, fewer chips were available.Many automakers have had to idle plants for a week or two at a time in the first half of 2021. G.M., Ford Motor and others have also resorted to producing vehicles without certain components and holding them at plants until the required parts arrive. At one point, G.M. had about 20,000 nearly complete vehicles awaiting electronic components. It began shipping them in June.Ford has been hit harder than many other automakers because of a fire at one of its suppliers’ factories in Japan. At the end of June, Ford had about 162,000 vehicles at dealer lots, fewer than half the number it had just three months ago and roughly a quarter of the stock its dealers typically hold.This month, Ford is slowing production at several North American plants because of the chip shortage. The company said it planned to focus on completing vehicles.Mr. Ricart recently took a trip on his Harley-Davidson to Louisville, Ky., and got a look at the trucks and S.U.V.s at a Ford plant that are waiting to be finished. He said he had seen “thousands of trucks in fields with temporary fencing around them.”He said he hoped to get some of those trucks soon because Ricart Ford had only about 30 F-150 pickup trucks in stock. “We’re used to selling a couple hundred a month.” More

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    Inflation Is Here. What Now?

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    Prices are rising fast, in ways that seem temporary, yet this could change expectations in ways that are self-reinforcing.Rising prices for things like lumber reflect rising demand meeting a supply that cannot be immediately and easily increased.Rogelio V. Solis/Associated PressThe central fact of the American economy in mid-2021 is that demand for all sorts of goods and services has surged. But supplies are coming back slowly, with the economy acting like a creaky machine that was turned off for a year and has some rusty parts.The result, as underlined in new government data this week, is shortages and price inflation across many parts of the economy. That is putting the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve in a jam that is only partly of their own making.Higher prices and the other problems that result from an economy that reboots itself are frustrating, but should be temporary. Still, the longer that the surges in prices continue and the more parts of the economy that they encompass, the greater the chances that Americans’ psychology about prices and inflation could shift in ways that become self-sustaining.For the last few decades, companies have resisted raising prices or paying higher wages because they felt that doing so would cost them too much business. That put a damper on inflation across the economy. The question is whether current circumstances are evolving in a way that could change that.“Now the genie’s out of the bottle,” said Kristin Forbes, an economist at M.I.T. and a former official at the U.S. Treasury and the Bank of England. “If everybody else is raising prices, it becomes a lot easier for you to do that, too.”To understand the bewildering mix of forces at play, consider what’s going on at your nearest used-car lot.The price of used cars and trucks rose 10 percent in April, according to the latest federal data, one major factor in pushing the Consumer Price Index to its steepest year-over-year jump in 13 years. People in the car business say that this has not one cause, but several — each with different implications for the economy and for policy.Some involve the microeconomic decisions made by companies and consumers many months ago that are still rippling through the automobile market.Rental car companies reduced their fleets during the pandemic-induced collapse in travel, and are now struggling to rebuild their inventories — and therefore are not selling the used cars that in a normal market they would continually be unloading. New car sales fell last year during the pandemic, resulting in fewer trade-ins finding their way into the used-car market, and now new car sales are being held back by a shortage of microchips.There isn’t much that government policy can do to fix those problems, unless it involves a time machine. But government policies are part of the story.The combined $2,000 per-person stimulus checks most Americans received in the early months of the year amount to a healthy down payment for many families. Generous unemployment benefits are helping contain the number of delinquent auto loans, and in turn the supplies of repossessed cars on the market. Low interest rate policies from the Fed have made financing cheap.But let’s imagine that, in response to the problem, the Fed raised interest rates or that Congress increased taxes to claw back stimulus payments.Those actions alone wouldn’t create more microchips or let rental car companies undo decisions from a year ago. Higher interest rates or taxes might even make things worse, if the actions led suppliers to hold back on investing in new capacity for fear demand would fall in the future.The used-car market may start to stabilize late this year, but the problems are unlikely to be fully worked out until 2022, said Jessica Caldwell, an auto industry analyst with Edmunds.“The only winners here are people that have a vehicle they want to get rid of,” she said. “If you have a car to sell that you don’t need, it is bonkers what you can get for it.”At any given time, the prices for some things are rising and those for others are falling, for all kinds of idiosyncratic reasons. Policymakers generally try not to react to those moves; they are essential to how markets work. If there is a shortage of limes, their prices spike and people use more lemons.What is unusual about this moment is that prices for so many things are rising at once, albeit for different reasons. Some, like airfares, are simply returning to prepandemic levels, which shows up in inflation data as a price increase. Others, like lumber prices, reflect high demand along with supply that is fixed in the short run.And still others, like the spike in East Coast gasoline prices after a cyberattack shut down a major pipeline, are truly random events that tell us virtually nothing about underlying supply and demand or future inflation.Some other sectors seem poised to experience price rises. Restaurants, for example, are complaining of severe labor shortages that are forcing them to curtail service or sharply raise pay for line cooks and dishwashers. If they try to reflect those higher costs in their prices, it will cause the price of food away from home to start rising faster than the (already fairly high) 3.8 percent figure over the last year.Professional inflation-watchers are on close watch for signs that these forces might be unleashing a form of thinking about price dynamics unseen since the early 1980s, when prices rose in part because everyone expected them to.The Fed is betting that won’t happen — that even if there are several months of surging prices, it will be at worst a one-time adjustment, and potentially something that reverses as old spending patterns return and workers return to their jobs.“If past experience is any guide, production will rise to meet the level of goods demand before too long,” the Fed governor Lael Brainard said in a speech this week. “A limited period of pandemic-related price increases is unlikely to durably change inflation dynamics.”For now, movements in key financial markets mostly align with the Fed view.Futures contracts for major commodities like oil and copper, for example, suggest that traders expect prices to fall slightly in the years ahead, not rise further.And in the bond market, even after a surge in longer-term interest rates following the high inflation reading Wednesday, most signs point to future inflation consistent with the 2 percent the Fed aims for.Still, the level of future inflation implied by those bond prices has risen significantly in the last few weeks, meaning further moves are likely to increase worries that the inflation issues will be not-so-transitory after all. And the pattern could change abruptly if more evidence starts to arrive that the outlook for inflation is becoming unmoored.“We aren’t obviously on the way to a very high and persistent inflation outcome,” said Brian Sack, director of global economics at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw and a former senior Federal Reserve official. “But we’re at an inflection point, in that the rise in inflation expectations to date has been a policy success, but a rise from here could become a policy problem.”The Fed may believe that the evidence emerging in various corners of the economy is a one-time occurrence that will fade into memory before too long. The Biden administration is betting its agenda on the same idea.Ultimately, what matters more than whatever the bond market does is how ordinary Americans who make everyday economic decisions — demanding raises or not, paying more for a car or not — view things. Can they wait for the complex machinery of the American economy to fully crank into gear? More