Experts Warn Against Long-Term Auto Loan Trend
After a year of record new-vehicle sales, automakers, dealers, and the banks and finance companies that issue car loans are jubilantly exchanging high-fives. Analysts list several reasons for record sales of 17.5 million vehicles in 2015, including an improving economy and job market, low interest rates, cheap gas and growth in leasing. New-car sales also are being driven by easy credit: Consumers, many with marginal credit ratings,...
Stocks End Mixed Despite Jobs Data
New York — Stocks had a mixed reaction Friday to the surprisingly strong October jobs report as investors adjusted to the prospect of higher interest rates as early as next month. While the major indexes, on the surface, had a muted reaction to the jobs numbers, a look at the individual parts of the market showed investors were actively reshuffling their portfolios. Dividend-paying stocks, which are typically bought for their...
Social Security Benefits Won’t Be Increased
Washington — Older Americans got a double dose of bad news Thursday: There will be no cost-of-living increase in Social Security benefits next year, and Medicare bills are set to soar for many. It’s just the third time in 40 years that Social Security payments will remain flat. All three times have come since 2010. The annual cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, by law is based on a government measure of inflation that was released...
Manhunt for Escapees Cost N.Y. $22 Million
Albany, N.y. — Payroll records suggest the hunt for two escaped killers in northern New York cost more than $1 million a day, with overtime alone for state troopers and corrections officers $22 million higher than last year. State comptroller records obtained Friday by The Associated Press for June and July show that overtime totaled $41 million for the corrections department and $17.6 million for state police. That’s roughly twice...
Ben Bernanke: Interest Rate Critics Wrong
Washington — Federal Reserve chairs are experts at being boring. They use words like “moderate,” “uncertain,” or “stability” like we use the words “um,” “and,” or “but.” It’s, as former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan put it, a “language of purposeful obfuscation” that drones on so long you forget what was just asked, let alone whether this answered it, just as long as it’s mercifully over. But now that he’s free of the strictures of office,...
