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Subprime Datapoint Of The Day Auto Loan Edition

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by Felix Salmon
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Dec 05 2007 12:00am EDT

Subprime Datapoint of the Day, Auto Loan Edition

And you thought subprime mortgages had high default rates. William Adams, Liran Einav, and Jonathan Levin examine subprime auto loans:

The average purchaser finances around 90 percent of the price of the automobile, with the average loan size being around $11,000. Repayment is highly uncertain: more than half of the loans default, and the majority of these default within the first year of repayment. Interest rates reflect the high probability of default: a typical loan in the authors' dataset has an annual interest rate on the order of 25-30 percent.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with the housing market, of course. But these are borrowers who are 15% more likely to default for every $1,000 that's tacked on to the size of the loan. Which does make you think twice about the companies which were lending them hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy houses.

(Via Thoma)

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