Le Jive Infomedia

There are a lot of people who are looking to make big ticket purchases these days, and they all seem to have one question on their mind – where the hell did all the deals go?  This is a valid question, of course. Because of the financial crisis that affected the North American (and indeed the global) economy, the last few years have been filled with consumer durables – that is, items such as boats and cars – that were going for ridiculously low prices on the public market. The reason for this probably had a lot to do with the structural causes of the recession, which started with a bunch of people who were unable to continue paying off their liabilities.

This meant that huge amounts of assets were being seized all over the country – and of course, the car repo agencies had nothing else to do with these seized vehicles than to place them back on the market, where they were usually auctioned off at fire sale prices because nobody could find a buyer who would agree to pay the book value of the car.
The result of all this was that prices fell across the entire market. This was great for consumers, of course, because consumers are always on the lookout for low prices (and rightly so); however, it was not actually that good, mainly because there were very few consumers who had the kind of liquid cash on hand that was needed to make purchases like these. This meant that many of these assets remained unsold – not just repo cars, but other large items like bank repo boats as well. Now that the crisis is slowly coming to a halt, we’re seeing prices start to begin the inevitable ascent. As more people become willing to purchase, things will become more expensive. If you are looking to buy a large consumer durable, we suggest you act quickly, before prices rise even more. As they say, carpe diem.