Posts Tagged ‘japan-earthquake’
Reporting: Prices soar on the used car lot
Cross-posted from msnbc.com, where it originally appeared. To read it in context, with all information boxes and art, click here.
When Debra Neel went to check out used Jeeps recently in Indianapolis, she left with a bad case of sticker shock.
“We were looking around $4,000 or $5,000 for a good used car for a teenager,” but “you can’t find them anymore,” Neel said. That was readily confirmed by Bob Falcone, president of Falcone Volkswagen, Subaru & Saab in downtown Indianapolis.
Falcone said that a couple of years ago, Neel might have been able to get the 12-year-old Jeep she was considering at her $4,000 to $5,000 price point. The 2000 model on the lot, after all, has almost 90,000 miles on it and gets only 16 miles to the gallon.
Its price tag today: $13,900.
“It’s unbelievable,” Falcone acknowledged. He said the used car market is the strongest it has ever been in his 34 years in business.
Prices to soar 30 percent year over year
Dealers and automotive analysts say it’s the same across the country. A variety of factors, including the nation’s weak economic recovery, high gasoline prices and the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, have converged in recent weeks to send demand for used vehicles skyrocketing and supply plummeting, said Jeremy Anwyl, chief executive of Edmunds.com, which tracks new and used car prices.
Triple whammy slows Japan relief effort
A gas station worker tells drivers who camped out overnight Wednesday that no fuel is available in Ichinoseki in northern Japan. Physical destruction and harsh, snowy conditions have created a severe fuel shortage in the country. (Hiroaki Ono/AP)
Rescue and recovery efforts after the nuclear disaster in Japan are being stymied by a nearly overwhelming array of obstacles, as government and aid groups struggle with the physical devastation of last week’s earthquake and tsunami, the specter of radiation dangers and harsh weather conditions.
“The huge challenge for the aid workers on the ground is just the operating conditions they are dealing with,” said Kirsten Mildren, a spokeswoman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. “Search and rescue workers are saying they’ve never seen anything like this.”
Mildren said the tsunami that followed last week’s magnitude 9.0 earthquake “took everything in its path. … The level of destruction is just monumental and you’ve still got flooded areas, and now on top of that you’ve got this rain and this snow.”
The need in Japan is extreme, the United Nations reported. The 450,000 refugees crowded into 2,444 shelters don’t begin to tell the story: About 1.6 million households are without water in 12 prefectures. Temperatures are below freezing in much of the area. Anxiety is rising over radiation leaks from the damaged Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear reactors.
Full story (Miranda Leitsinger and Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)
Alex Johnson - Journalist at Large 