Free Republic

Apple Inc. was leading a slate of new bond sales on Tuesday after a nearly two-week lull, suggesting investors are still eager to lend to big blue-chip companies despite concerns that a global recession could be developing. The tech giant, a prolific issuer in recent years as its overseas cash pile has grown, set the size of its sale at $12 billion early Tuesday afternoon, the high side of investor expectations. Apple has been widely followed in the debt market since it sold $17 billion in 2013, which at the time ranked as the biggest corporate-bond sale on record. Apple...

Nearly half of Americans say that they definitely or probably couldn’t come up with $2,000 in 30 days, according to new research, raising concerns about the financial fragility of many households. In a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Annamaria Lusardi of the George Washington School of Business, Daniel J. Schneider of Princeton University and Peter Tufano of Harvard Business School used data from the 2009 TNS Global Economic Crisis survey to document widespread financial weakness in the U.S. and other countries. The survey asked a simple question, “If you were to face a $2,000 unexpected expense...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Battered by tight credit and the worst recession in decades, industrywide U.S. auto sales plunged 36% from year-ago levels in December, a decline that hit all of the major automakers, both foreign and domestic, and capped the industry's worst year since 1992. But despite the big drop off from year-ago sales, the December results were up about 20% from November, although the gain was more narrow on a seasonally adjusted basis. A strong final week of the month gave some experts a glimmer of hope that the weak sales that have plagued the industry have finally...

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM WRONG AGAIN?By Larry Burkett, with Joseph Slife The older I get, the more I realize that the conventional wisdom, what everybody "knows" to be true, often isn’t true—or wise. For example, the recession, which some predicted would be long lasting, appears to be over. If so, it would be the mildest recession in the past 50 years. Indeed, a few economists now doubt whether the economy was in a recession at all, since new figures indicate that the nation’s Gross Domestic Product actually grew slightly over the past year. But even though the professional prognosticators may have been...