I assume Feb, especially in a leap year is tricky. And, I may be willing to concede that unseasonably warm weather is a factor – though I am deeply adverse to this type of ad hocery, as it is ripe for confirmation bias.

All that having been said, autosales smashed even my best guesses. I had stopped trying to give month-to-month but the last time I looked carefully I was thinking we would hit about 14.5 Million SAAR sometime early to the middle of this year.

Feb came in at 15.2 Million SAAR. You can see the strong discontinuity in Bill McBrides chart

At this rate the vehicle stock in America is now growing and may be close to growing in per capita terms.

If this is not an outlier – and of course that remains to be seen – then that would suggest we have broken through the liquidity trap and the process of convergence to the long run growth path has begun.

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