This morning’s release of auto sales for the month of June shows that even though the idea of globalization says economies are more intertwined than ever before, it doesn’t mean that they now all move in unison. The chart below shows the trailing 12-month total of new car sales in the United States versus Europe going back to 1993.
In recent years, auto sales in the US have seen a sharp rebound even as sales in Europe have been sliding. In fact, while the total number of new cars in the US in the twelve months ending 6/30 hit its highest level in five years (15.0 mln), sales in Europe dropped to their lowest levels since December 1995 (12.1 mln)!
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Even more interesting is the fact that while the last five years have seen rebounding US sales while European sales decline, in the ten years prior to that, it was European sales that were rising while US sales declined. Technology has made the US and Europe more inter-connected than ever, but both literally and figuratively, the two economies are still oceans apart.
