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Now... if you’re a truck guy, it’s worse. The average full-size pickup sold in America in March hit $65,964. That’s not the loaded King Ranch with leather seats. That’s the average. A quarter-century ago, an F-150 started under $20,000.
And here’s the part that really gets me. Americans aren’t paying these prices and smiling. They’re doing what you’d expect — they’re keeping their old cars longer. The average vehicle on the road is now 12.8 years old, up from about 9 years in 2000. We’re not buying new cars. We’re nursing old ones.
Everyone focuses on CPI and PCE and whatever inflation metric the Fed prefers this month. But the car lot doesn’t lie. When a working family can’t replace their 12-year-old sedan without taking on a six- or seven-year loan, that tells you everything about where the middle class actually stands.
The Fed can talk about 2% all day long. But 26 years of compounding — prices up 145%, wages up roughly 90% — has left a gap that no interest rate adjustment is going to close. That gap is sitting in your driveway, getting older every year.
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