“Kind of crazy”—how the booming US used car market is driving inflation

Enlarge (credit: Nathan Mattise)

Last month it took Carey Cherner, a 36-year-old used car dealer in Kensington, Maryland, less than 12 hours to sell a 2001 Ford F-150 pick-up truck with 184,000 miles on the clock. It went for $7,500-50 percent higher than usual.

Cherner's experience was not a one-off in the US used car market, where prices are rising rapidly. The industry is at t heart of the country's growing inflationary pressures-and has therefore become a subject of great interest to policymakers in Washington.

There's more people buying cars than there are cars in the market, which makes it go kind of crazy," Cherner said.

Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments