Borrowers who took out auto loans over the past year are missing payments at the highest level since the recession, fueling concerns among regulators, analysts and some in the car industry that practices that helped boost 2014 light-vehicle sales to a near-decade high could backfire, the Wall Street Journal reported today. “It’s clear that credit quality is eroding now, and pretty quickly,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. More than 2.6 percent of car-loan borrowers who took out loans in the first quarter of last year had missed at least one monthly payment by November, the highest level of early loan trouble since 2008, when such delinquencies rose above 3 percent, according to an analysis of data by Moody’s Analytics. More than 8.4 percent of borrowers with weak credit scores who took out loans in the first quarter of 2014 had missed payments by November, according to the Moody’s analysis of Equifax credit-reporting data. That was the highest level since 2008, when early delinquencies for subprime borrowers rose above 9 percent.
