LITTLE ROCK — QUOTE OF THE DAY
“The breakup of the eurozone will be a disaster. Greece could leave, and others could leave, and this would be a huge financial tsunami.”
Dariusz Kowalczyk,
senior economist at Credit Agricole CIB Article, 1D30-year mortgage rate falls to 3.78%
WASHINGTON - The average U.S. rate for the 30-year fixed mortgage fell to a record low for a fourth straight week.
Cheap mortgages have helped boost home sales modestly this year.
Mortgage buyer Freddie Mac - officially, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. - said Thursday that the rate on the 30-year loan dipped to 3.78 percent. That’s down from 3.79 percent last week and the lowest since long-term mortgages began in the 1950s.
The average rate on 15-year fixed mortgage, a popular option for refinancing, held steady at 3.04, matching the record low hit last week.
The average does not include extra fees, known as points, which most borrowers must pay to get the lowest rates. One point equals 1 percent of the loan amount.
The average fee for 30-year loans was 0.8, down from 0.7 last week. The fee for 15-year loans was 0.7, unchanged from last week,
The average rate on one-year adjustable rate mortgages was 2.75 percent last week, down from 2.78 percent the previous week. The fee for one-year adjustable rate loans was 0.4 point, down from 0.5 last week.
Times-Picayune to end daily printing
NEW ORLEANS - The Times-Picayune, one of the nation’s oldest newspapers, will no longer offer print editions seven days a week and instead plans to offer three printed issues a week starting in the fall. The change means New Orleans would become the largest metro area in the nation without a daily newspaper in the digital age.
The changes announced Thursday were combined with similar moves at three major Alabama daily newspapers also owned by the Newhouse family group’s Advance Publications.
The Birmingham News, the Press-Register in Mobile and The Huntsville Times will switch to publishing three days a week as part of a new focus on online news. At all four papers, there will be unspecified staff cuts. All four papers will continue to publish continuously on their websites, and online access will remain free.
Randy Siegel, Advance Publications’ president of local digital strategy, didn’t say how much money the reduced print runs in Louisiana and Alabama would save, nor how many staff members would be laid off or hired in the new online units.
Buffett: May buy more newspapers
Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway Inc. struck a deal this month to acquire 63 newspapers, said he may buy more publications as the industry rethinks whether to offer free content on the Internet.
“This is an unsustainable model and certain of our papers are already making progress in moving to something that makes more sense,” Buffett wrote in a letter to editors and publishers of Berkshire’s daily newspapers.
Buffett is adding to Berkshire’s newspaper holdings with the $142 million deal announced May 17 for Media General Inc.
publications including the Richmond Times-Dispatch of Virginia. The billionaire is betting that papers with a community focus can profit as they change their models.
While circulation may slip, papers only fail when there are dailies competing in the same town, a publication forfeits its position as the primary source of locally important information or the market doesn’t have a sense of identity, he said.
“We don’t face those problems,” Buffett, 81, wrote in the letter dated Tuesday and posted on the website of Berkshire’s Omaha World-Herald, which is in the Nebraska town where Buffett’s company is based.
Tiffany’s cuts its forecast for profits
NEW YORK - Tiffany & Co., a bellwether of luxury spending, says its sales aren’t rising as fast as last year in the U.S. or abroad, and the gift and jewelry chain cut its forecasts for sales and profit for the year.
Tiffany delivered its lower outlook on Thursday as it reported first-quarter profit essentially the same as a year ago and below what analysts were expecting.
MasterCard Advisors’ SpendingPulse, which monitors all types of spending, including cash, released figures that show jewelry sales rose 10.2 percent in the third quarter of 2011 compared with a year earlier. But they rose only 7 percent in the fourth quarter and then 5.3 percent in the first quarter of 2012. April sales actually fell 3.7 percent compared with a year ago, according to SpendingPulse.
Tiffany reported net income of $81.5 million, or 64 cents per share, for the quarter that ended April 30, almost the same as its net income of $81.1 million, or 63 cents per share, a year earlier. The jeweler’s revenue rose almost 8 percent to $819.2 million.
Analysts had expected earnings of 69 cents per share on revenue of $817.1 million.
Business, Pages 28 on 05/25/2012