Auto Sales and Unemployment: A Match Made in a Recession

You can’t turn a newspaper page (or in my case, click a newspaper story on your Kindle) without seeing an article dissecting the relationship between housing pricing and unemployment. But what about the relationship between auto sales and unemployment? It turns out the correlation is similar to the house-prices-unemployment-rate dance.

Here’s a graphic, courtesy of the Calculated Risk blog:

Calculated Risk explains:

Light vehicle sales usually bottom sometime before the unemployment rate peaks – just like for housing starts. This makes sense since the usual two engines of recovery are housing and personal consumption.

In case you missed it, housing prices have climbed for four straight months.

I take this as a good sign.