Auto sales: another V-shaped recovery

Just by eyeballing this chart you can see that there has been a huge rebound in auto sales since they hit bottom last February. Sales had fallen so far for so long that "pent-up demand" almost had to show up at some point. The catalyst for the sales upturn was not the "cash for clunkers" program, it was simply a) time, which heals all wounds, even the economic ones, and b) a return of consumer confidence driven by the growing realization that the world was not coming to an end as so many had thought at the end of last year.