Author: starbpo

IN DETROIT — Members of the Teamsters will soon have Vice President Kamala Harris over for a roundtable talk. However, union president Sean O’Brien has not yet been invited to speak at the Democratic National Convention next week. In an email on Friday, Kara Deniz, a spokeswoman for the 1.3-million-member union, said that the Teamsters are working with Harris’ campaign to set times for the roundtable. But Deniz said Friday night that O’Brien has not heard back about his request to talk at the Democratic National Convention, which starts Monday in Chicago. Speaking at the GOP convention last month made…

A person with knowledge of the case says that former U.S. Rep. George Santos will likely plead guilty to more than one count of federal theft. The New York Republican Santos is set to make his plea at a court hearing on Long Island on Monday, the person said. The person could not talk about the facts of the plea in public, so they spoke to the Associated Press under the condition that they not be named. Messages were sent to three lawyers representing Santos asking them to respond. The court hearing was set for Monday afternoon after both the…

Social Security has been around for 89 years today. Let’s think about how hard, if not impossible, it would be for most Americans to get something similar. Social Security has been giving retirees a kind of annuity since August 14, 1935. Their guaranteed payouts are based on inflation. A retiree could not buy something on the open market that would be equal to what Social Security gives them. Annuities that take inflation into account used to be sold by insurance companies, but they no longer do. In another way, though, most Americans would have a hard time, if not be…

There are some similarities between the U.S. stock market today and the wild Roaring Twenties market a hundred years ago, but it’s not a sign you can bank on. Still, it would be very exciting if the stock market had another run like it did in the 1920s. In fact, the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA 0.24% would go over 150,000 if it raises as much between now and 2029 as it did during the same time period in the 1920s. Even though there are some connections between now and the 1920s, there are also some big differences. Check out…

It’s simple to check fund returns, but what you see isn’t always what you get. A new Morningstar MORN 0.87% study found that the average investor misses out on about 15% of mutual funds’ annual profits. However, there are ways to almost completely close the gap. In the past ten years, the average yearly return on a mutual fund has been 7.3%. However, Morningstar, a company that tracks the flow of money into and out of funds, found that fund owners didn’t do nearly as well. They got an average annual return of 6.3%. Over the years that the average…

Bavarian Nordic stock went up again on Friday after the company that makes the measles vaccine said it was now trying to get permission to vaccinate teens. The only mpox vaccine allowed in the U.S. and Europe is Bavarian Nordic. The World Health Organization has called mpox a global health emergency because it has spread in Africa and other places. On Friday, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that this year there have been 17,541 cases, with 517 deaths, in 12 countries. 17.83% of Bavarian Nordic shares are BAVA. The price of BVNRY 14.81% went up 19%…

Last week, mortgage rates dropped a lot. This week, they went up a little, but they were still much lower than they were a year ago. For now, people who want to buy a house are staying away. Data provided by Freddie Mac FMCC 0.88% on Thursday showed that the average rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was 6.49% as of August 15. One basis point is equal to one hundredth of a percentage point. It’s up two basis points from the week before. The 30-year bond had an average rate of 7.09% a year ago. It went up from…

The numbers show that builders cut back on new projects in July, which is why the number of new homes built dropped 6.8% from the previous month. The number of home starts dropped from 1.33 million in June to 1.24 million per year, the government said Friday. That many homes would be built in a year if they were built at the same rate every month like they were in July. It wasn’t as fast as Wall Street thought it would be, at 1.34 million per month. All of the numbers have been changed to account for the seasons. The…

As of the first week of August, the University of Michigan’s measure of consumer confidence rose from 66.4 the previous month to 67.8. It’s the first rise after four months of falls. Wall Street Journal asked economists and found that most of them thought the reading for August would be 66.6. Important facts: The study says that a measure of how consumers felt about the current situation dropped from 62.7 in July to 60.9 in August. That level hasn’t been that low since December 2022. But a measure of how they feel about the future went up from 68.8 to…

More and more, stores are putting money into lowering the prices of everyday things. Walmart Inc. is leading the way in this trend, which will likely help it gain more market share. The company D.A. Davidson said this and released a new price-tracking database on Friday. The database had been in the works for 18 months. “We are releasing this work now for two reasons: after 18 months, we have enough data; and the trend in grocery prices has become a hot-button issue after some prices went up,” analysts Michael Baker and Keegan Cox wrote in a commentary about the…