> this should be a huge red flag to anyone with any sense of history. It's a small red flag and not at all concerning as a macro risk. In the scale of the US e

> this should be a huge red flag to anyone with any sense of history. It's a small red flag and not at all concerning as a macro risk. In the scale of the US economy and US household finances (including disposable income vs debt service payments), Carvana & pals could hardly be more meaningless. Overall the subprime car loan industry is a modest rounding error sized problem (ie it can't cause even a small fraction of the damage the housing implosion did, that you're referring to re sense of history). For the auto industry subprime is around 7% of new vehicles and a quarter of used vehicles (both figures have decreased over the past year as the employment picture has improved). In a very bad outcome scenario, only a minority share of those subprime loans will go bad. The subprime sector risk is, realistically, measured in the tens of billions of dollars, not trillions (as the housing market risk was). Tens of billions of dollars is as close to meaningless as non-trivial things get against $137 trillion in US household assets and the US income figures. People get overly paranoid up as a matter of routine, looking for the next financial crisis. Every year there are typically a few items that the financial media will run headlines with in terms of clickbait doom, blaring about how x y z is the next impending financial crisis doom-cause agent. Subprime auto loans are not a big threat to the US economy. If you want to be worried about something, there are only two primary financial categories domestically to pay serious attention to: housing and the stock market. Nothing else much matters by comparison, those are the two giants, by a very dramatic margin (subprime auto loans, student loans and credit card debt are each trivial compared to housing & stocks, in terms of risk to the US economy).