John Rubino is a former Wall Street financial analyst and author or co-author of five books, including The Money Bubble: What to Do Before It Pops and Clean Money: Picking Winners in the Green-Tech Boom. He founded the popular financial website DollarCollapse.com in 2004, sold it in 2022, and now publishes John Rubino’s Substack newsletter.
Now, let’s zoom in on specific sectors that seem to be rolling over. Auto loan delinquency rates are spiking:
Housing is frozen, but with inventories of homes for sale rising, a significant price decline looks imminent:
(Wolf Street) – Demand in the resale market just keeps getting crushed after every little sign of green shoots. Sales of existing single-family houses, townhouses, condos, and co-ops that closed in January dropped by 4.9% from December, seasonally adjusted, to an annual rate of 4.08 million sales, according to the National Association of Realtors today.
This rate of sales was up just 2.0% from the abysmally low levels a year ago – 2024 as a whole had been the worst sales year since 1995 – and flat with the abysmally low levels two years ago.
Compared to January 2021, the sales rate was down by 36%, compared to January 2019, the sales rate was down by 25% (historical data from YCharts):
What Should We Do?
The Table of Contents has a lot of actionable advice. Or…we can emulate iconic investor Warren Buffett, who is building an epic cash hoard in anticipation of stocks getting a lot cheaper:
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