John Oliver just put the auto-loan industry on notice.
The do-gooder “Last Week Tonight” host spent nearly 18 minutes Sunday cracking down on both “Buy Here, Pay Here” lenders and those dealing in sub-prime car loans. The first option crushes people with bad credit under the weight of a 20-something-percent loan, while the latter is exactly what caused the 2007 housing market collapse.
At least Wall Street appears to be learning from (extremely recent) history. Great.
Oliver demonstrated the madness by tracking one “piece of s–t demon car” that was sold 10 different times, and repossessed eight. The crappy Kia Optima was apparently stolen one final time, though perhaps it was actually just quietly repo’d again.
Either way, hopefully it was put out of its misery.
Later, Keegan-Michael Key and Bob Balaban dropped in to help the HBO personality — as Crazy Johnny the used car salesman — parody the dire situation; that’s when the segment became as funny as it was upsetting. Watch the video above.