The USA needs to sell roughly 15 million new cars a year to maintain an adequate supply of used cars. Falling below that target will cause used car prices to rise in the following years.
Not necessarily. Cars that go out of circulation can be made road worthy, if demand for them is there. Having a supply of new cars means old second hand cars get retired even if they could be made just as road worthy as any other second hand cars.
What happened 12 years ago? 2008 happened, and resulted in a decade of incredibly low new-vehicle output. Add in the Cash for Clunkers program, and used inventory levels are about as low as they’ve ever been. This is the same as the housing market, the result of a decade of underbuilding.
Couple that with stimulus money making down payments easy, and low interest rates keeping monthly payments low, and you have a recipe for prices to take off like a rocket, from both ends of the supply-demand curve.
Right, that doesn't sound like a supply chain issue, that sounds like a decade of structural issues leading to a perfect setup for structural inflation