Floating On a Sea of Debt - Part Deux
Some time in 2007 or 2008 , I wrote an AMD Comment piece under the headline " We Are Floating On a Sea of Debt ." It was in relation to what I then figured was an unsustainable bubble of financial madness , driven by a Wall Street culture that was itself fueled by seven-figure bonuses and large bags of cocaine . I was certain that we were hurtling towards a brick wall , with no brakes . I remember turning up at the then ' Cincinnati ' Trade Show at around that time ( aka the V-Twin Expo ) and , bearing in mind it was supposed to be a business nexus for people who were in a position to run and manage a dealer network program , saw two good ' ol boys from the Bayou ( literally ) roll a pair of camo paintjob Softails past our booth on set-up day . One of the several dozen ' new ' exhibitors that would pop up like overnight mushrooms back then , every time showtime rolled around . Don ' t get me wrong . They were perfectly nice , genuine guys . I went to meet them during the show . Though not to my taste , they had nice bikes - mostly catalog builds though - and yes , between themselves , two part-time buddies , and their minimum wage weekend wrenchers , they reckoned they could pump out as many as one a day - so wanted to find tell that to the kids nowadays themselves some dealers . Someone from across the aisle saw me watching this , and noted what I hoped had been an imperceptible look of disbelief and shake of the head and came over , looked me straight in the eyes and said : " You ' re right . We are so f **** d ." Throughout that weekend I had a lot of people telling me that I was just an archetypal journo , sensationalizing for the purposes of selfaggrandisement , a typically negative cynic , who just can ' t stand to see so much success going on around him . Think back to that pre-financial crisis and ' Great Recession ' era . Money was flowing like ' milk and honey ', bike sales were going through the roof , Harley dealers were gouging buyers with premiums ( there was even , in effect , a futures market for spots on dealer wait lists ), and Harley was channel-stuffing in order to keep up with the shareholder dividends that Wall Street needed for all that cocaine . Complete turnkey , air-cooled V-twin engine sales were running at the rate of at least 70,000 a year . That peaked around March 2006 , but that number doesn ' t include the ' catalog-order ' component sales for customizer , dealer and consumer self-build engines that could have been running at an additional 15,000 engines a year at that stage . Either way , the number of ' catalog builds ' being seen then was extraordinary , and patently unsustainable . Most were pretty crap really . Maybe Big Dog and American Ironhorse aside , not many of the so-called branded V-twins had any chance of getting insured , even less to pass the then ( in hindsight ) incredibly lax emissions and noise requirements . Sadly , some projects that actually did deserve to prosper weren ' t getting a look-in because building well don ' t come cheap . Here ' s the kicker though . They were , of course , almost all being bought on credit . The low or no initial interest rate , zero deposit , and minimal credit check culture of the day built up such a pile of cheaply acquired debt - debt that became expensive to service once the easy-in deals expired - that it was patently obvious that we were headed for a meltdown . Sure enough , once the collapse of the credit swaps and derivatives ' chicken-intosteak ' financial smoke and mirrors culture started triggering steepling mortgage foreclosures , and once the trickle of leaving-box toting Wall Streeters became a torrent , the sea of debt rose up , tsunami like , sweeping away all before it . To channel Monty Python , " you tell that to the kids nowadays though , and they don ' t believe it , you know ." So , here we are , 17 or 18 years later , and this is my ' Part Deux '. History is mocking us as successive governments , administrations , central bankers and Treasury Department heads have failed to protect us . It is a failure enshrined in institutional memory of global proportions . This is a worldwide problem , I ' m not just ' looking at you ' America , but the biggest danger we face is from domestic U . S . economic imbalance . Jamie Dimon , the Chairman and CEO of JP Morgan Chase , is generally regarded , on both sides of the aisle , as one of the ' good guys '. Indeed , he ' s been touted as a possible future Treasury Chief . He was interviewed by Bloomberg at a mid-May conference in France that had been convened to try to reignite a sense of urgency that is absent from what is known as the Basel I , II and III process . This was a series of international bank and financial institution agreements and regulations that were devised to protect us all from insane lending practices and unsustainable levels of debt . Unfortunately , Wall Street has succeeded so well in watering down the final stage of the system that it is so far from being fit for purpose , that it is likely doing more harm than good . Very much the " insider ' s insider ," Dimon is ringing alarm bells . Taken in concert with the failure of the international community to protect democracy from the threats of Russia , China , Iran and others , and the trend to authoritarian politics in general in the West , he for one sounded like a man convinced that we live beneath a deck of cards that can only but tumble . And there are dozens , hundreds of commentators and analysts ringing those same bells . Consider this random selection of current financial snapshots . In 1992 , America ' s net debt amounted to 46 % of GDP ; as of 2023 , it had reached 96 %. S & P and Fitch have downgraded U . S . debt , with Moody ' s likely to follow suit at any time . U . S . household debt was at an all-time high of $ 17.3tn entering 2024 - that is approx . 67 % of annual U . S . GDP . U . S . consumer credit card debt swelled by 16.6 % between Q3 2022 and Q3 2023 . Meanwhile , the default rate for leveraged corporate loans has increased to 3.4 % as of mid-January 2024 ( the second highest level since 2007 ) and complacency surrounds the implications of the explosion in the level of assets managed by Private Equity investors . It has grown from $ 2tn in 2012 to $ 8tn in 2023 . Though we are spoilt for choice , could this be the source of the next ' chicken into steak ' moment ?
Robin Bradley
Co-owner / Editor-in-Chief robin @ dealer-world . com
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