The US Automobile Market after the "Great Recession": Back to Business as Usual or Birth of a New Industry?

Bruno Jetin

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: This chapter will analyse the contradictory tendencies of the US economy and automobile market after the Great Recession. The first part comes back to the analysis of the Great Recession to see how much it was the consequence of an unsustainable growth regime, whereby a decreasing labour income share, coupled with growing social inequalities, have led US households to take on even more debt to maintain their consumption pattern. This growth regime has modelled car demand and car financing in a way that parallels the housing market. In a second part, we analyse the rebound of the automobile market to see why there are many reasons to think that it will be short-lived. The fundamental reason is that the US growth regime has not changed. Other important reasons are more structural: the changing demographics, consumption pattern, gas prices, and the absence of breakthrough innovation in alternative fuel cars likely to reduce dramatically the cost of motoring when it is most needed.

Keywords: USA; Automobile market; Great Recession; social inequalities; households; households debt; consumption (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-03216764
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Bruno Jetin. Global Automobile Demand. Vol.1: Major Trends in Mature Economies, Palgrave/McMillan, pp.10-36, 2015

Downloads: (external link)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-03216764/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-03216764

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().