Rising Vehicle Delinquencies and Repossessions

I. Vehicle Delinquencies and Repossessions
Vehicle delinquencies and repossessions are on the rise industry-wide and there have been reports of falsified loan applications. At least eight banks have come under scrutiny for allegedly jacking up interest rates on African American and Latino car buyers. [1] Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MASS) says: "The market is now thick with loose underwriting standards, predators and discriminatory lending practices and increasing repossessions."

When a Wall Street reporter arrived in Michigan to profile Dan Foss and his business, Credit Acceptance, it wasn't uncommon to find customers saddled with interest rates as high as thirty percent. "Borrowers typically paid twice what the car had cost the dealer," the paper reported, "and often these vehicles didn't outlast the loans that financed them." [2]

Credit Acceptance "operates on the assumption that it will collect only 70 percent of the money it lends out --which means it will end up repossessing an awful lot of cars and using those customers for the balance." "In the meantime, subprime lenders have boosted their average interest rate on used cars from 16 percent to nearly 20 percent annually, guaranteeing that more customers will default and end up with punitive court judgments and garnished wages."

"The company Foss built now boasts a profit margin nearly double that of Google, and the kind of growth curve -- a $10,000 investment at the end of 2008 would today be worth more than $150,000 -- that leaves Wall Street drooling."

"Perhaps the biggest scandal of all, though, is that we've come to accept as normal the crippling rates auto financiers can legally impose on people. Subprime lenders routinely bilk their customers for close to the maximum amount a given state allows."

II. Emissions Chemistry
"Between 2002 and 2014, the data showed that US methane emissions increased by more than 30 percent, accounting for 30 to 60 percent of an enormous spike in methane in the entire planet's atmosphere." "[This] new Harvard data, which comes on the heels of other aerial surveys showing big methane leakage, suggests that our new natural-gas infrastructure has been bleeding methane into the atmosphere in record quantities. And molecule for molecule, this unburned methane is much more efficient at trapping heat than carbon dioxide." "In fact, it's even possible that America's contribution to global warming increased during the Obama years." "Though it produces only half as much carbon as coal when you burn it, if you don't -- if it escapes into the air before it can be captured in a pipeline, or anywhere else along its route to a power plant or your stove -- then it traps heat in the atmosphere much more efficiently than CO2." [3]

The March 2016 Harvard study -- previously referred to -- used satellite data from across the country over a span of more than a decade to demonstrate that US methane emissions had spiked 30 percent since 2002. "The EPA's old chemistry and 100-year time frame assigned methane a heating value of 28 to 36 times that of carbon dioxide; a more accurate figure may be  between 86 and 105 times the potency of CO2 over the next decade or two." "Instead of peaking in 2007 and then trending downward, as the EPA has maintained, our combined emissions of methane and carbon dioxide have gone steadily and sharply up during the Obama years." "If the Harvard data hold up and we keep on fracking, it will be nearly impossible for the United States to meet its promised goal of a 26 to 28 percent reduction in greenhouse gases from 2005 levels by 2025." "We need to stop the fracking industry in its tracks, here and abroad." "Over the same ten years, the price of a solar panel has dropped at least 80 percent. New inventions have come online, such as air-source heat pumps, which use the latent heat in the air to warm and cool houses and electric storage batteries." "In other words, the relatively small percentage of the planet's surface known as the United States accounts for much (if not most) of the spike in atmospheric methane around the world." [4]

ADDENDUMS:
The Universal Periodic Review takes place every four years to scrutinize the human and civil rights practices of each of the UN's 193 member nations. Delegates from 117 countries took the opportunity to lambaste the U.S. record of civil rights violations exacted by its "brutal and racist police forces." Over 400 people were killed by police in 2015 alone. The U.S.has "largely failed"to implement any of the 171 changes suggested in the prior UPR report.

With 88.8 guns per 100 people, the U.S. greatly surpasses India, with 4.2 guns per 100 people, and Australia, with 15 guns per 100 people. [5]

*"On campuses, 'party culture' no longer excuses rape -- it wasn't even considered to be rape until the mid-1980s, after a landmark study found that 1 in 4 college women said they'd been sexually assaulted." "In 2014, the Department of Education launched a Title IX investigation into 58 universities, after students alleged they were mishandling sexual-assaults complaints; today the tally is 192." [6]

Footnotes
[1] Gary Rivlin, "Car Trouble," Mother Jones, March/April 2016.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Bill McKibben, "Global Warming's Terrifying New Chemistry," The New Yorker,  April 4, 2016.

[4] Ibid.

[5] "How Guns Stack Up," Time, Vol. 187, No. 24.

[6] Eliane Dockterman, "On campuses, 'party culture' no longer excuses rape," Time, Vol. 187, No. 24.