What’s in This Week’s Issue…

Good morning. The American Dream used to come with keys: a home, a car, a symbol of independence. But today, those keys feel more like handcuffs.

For millions of Americans, cars are no longer assets. They’re financial traps engineered by Wall Street, where missing one payment can mean losing your ride, your job, and your freedom.

Cars, once the ultimate symbol of mobility, have quietly become another domino in America’s debt economy waiting to fall.

So this week…

• 🏆 The Big Play: How Wall Street turned cars into America’s next debt bubble

• 💪 The Power Move: How to protect yourself in a country where mobility now comes on credit

• 💵 Follow the Money: Is Iran building nuclear weapons again?

-GEN

🏆 The Big Play

The biggest money power story of the week.

The Car Trap: How America Financialized the Open Road

America has always been defined by its roads and cars.

But somewhere between the promise of freedom and the pressure to keep up, the car stopped being a vehicle and became a liability.

To understand why millions are on the brink of losing theirs, you have to see how Wall Street, policy, and the auto industry engineered a perfect trap:

1. Wall Street’s Engineered Addiction

The story begins in the 1980s, when banks discovered that cars could be financialized just like houses.

They started bundling auto loans into securities, “ABS” or asset-backed securities, and selling them to investors hungry for yield.

What began as a $250 billion market has since ballooned into over $1.6 trillion in outstanding car loans, larger than credit card debt.

But the problem isn’t just size. It’s how the system works:

• Car prices have risen over 30% in five years, even for used vehicles.

• Average loan terms have stretched to around seven years.

• Interest rates hover around 9–12% for many borrowers, and over 20% for subprime ones.

• Monthly payments average over $750, the highest in history.

This means lenders get guaranteed profits for years, while consumers pay for cars that depreciate faster than the loans shrink.

And when borrowers can’t keep up, Wall Street wins again because repossessions, refinancing, and debt sales all generate fresh revenue.

It’s the same machine that fueled the 2008 housing collapse, only this time, the collateral drives itself off the lot.

2. The Illusion of Freedom

Cars were never supposed to be this essential or this expensive. America didn’t become car-dependent by accident. It was designed that way.

In the 1950s, lobbying from oil, tire, and car companies helped dismantle public transit systems and rewrite urban planning around highways.

The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 poured billions into roads, while streetcars, which were efficient and affordable, were bought out and shut down by auto manufacturers like GM.

The result:

• 86% of Americans now commute by car.

• Public transit investment per capita has declined for decades.

• And for most households, cars are the second-largest expense after housing.

Today, they've created a country where car ownership isn't freedom, it's mandatory for survival.

And that captive market is exactly what makes the current debt bubble so profitable and so dangerous.

3. The Subscription Trap: When Ownership Becomes Rental

Even ownership isn’t ownership anymore. Car companies, like tech giants, realized that selling the product once wasn’t enough, the real profits lie in renting access to features you already paid for:

• BMW charges $18 a month for heated seats.

• Tesla locks certain battery capacities and software behind paywalls.

• Ford and GM have announced subscription-based features that could bring in billions annually by the end of the decade.

It’s a shift from manufacturing cars to manufacturing cash flow. So, drivers aren’t customers anymore, they’re data points in a revenue stream.

And with connected car technology, companies can remotely disable vehicles when payments are missed, which means repossession is automated.

The future of driving, it turns out, looks less like freedom and more like a monthly bill.

💪 The Power Moves

Playbook for understanding the game of power.

How to Survive When the System Sells You Your Own Freedom

Wall Street’s car trap exposes a bigger truth: in America, access is replacing ownership, and mobility is becoming a privilege.

But if the system runs on leverage, the smartest move is learning to own your leverage, not be owned by it.

Here’s how:

• Cars aren’t assets; they’re liabilities: Buy only what gets you where you need to go, not what the system sells you as freedom.

• Avoid financing traps: If you can’t pay cash, minimize loan terms, skip add-ons, and avoid refinancing offers that reset debt.

• Prepare for automation: As cars become software, ownership will shift further toward control by corporations.

Because when every road is built by corporations and every mile is financed by Wall Street, real freedom isn’t about driving farther, it’s about knowing when to stop feeding the engine.

The Takeaway:

America built a system where cars symbolize independence and then financialized that independence into a debt market.

But here’s the truth: the next crash won’t be about homes. It’ll be about the highways.

Because when millions of Americans can’t afford the vehicles that keep the economy moving, it’s not just their engines that stall, it’s the entire American idea of mobility itself.

💵 Following the Money

Three of the wildest financial and corruption stories from around the world.

#1 - UN: Iran not actively enriching uranium but movement detected near stockpiles 

#2 - How OpenAI’s Sora is making deepfakes go mainstream

#3 - Amnesty International calls for war crimes investigation into US airstrike on Yemen

✨ Poll time!

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