New car sticker prices just cracked $50K for the first time in history. The reason? Auto loans have simultaneously surged to a record $41,000 average.

This isn't coincidence—it's textbook demand inflation. When lenders keep expanding credit limits, buyers stretch their budgets further, and sellers simply raise prices to capture that extra borrowing power. Classic cycle: easier money chasing the same goods equals higher prices.

What's wild is how normalized this has become. A decade ago, $50K would buy you a luxury ride. Now it's the averageTransaction. Meanwhile, those $41K loans mean buyers are financing 82% of the purchase price—locking themselves into years of payments for depreciating assets.

For anyone watching macro trends or thinking about hard assets versus depreciating ones, this data point hits different. The credit expansion playbook keeps running until it doesn't.