There is one basic question that keeps being asked about the U.S. auto industry: Is it on the rebound?
"People ask a lot, is the auto industry back?" says Kristin Dziczek, a director at the Center for Automotive Research. "And it depends on what scale you want to look at."
U.S. automakers are adding jobs, but the gains are slower compared with recoveries from previous recessions.
Against all Vatican expectations, the pope's Twitter account in Latin has gained more than 100,000 followers in six months and continues to grow.
Followers are not exclusively Roman Catholics or Latin scholars, but represent a wide variety of professions and religions from all over the world. Some go so far as to claim that the language of the ancient Romans is perfectly suited to 21st-century social media.
Pope Benedict XVI launched the first papal Twitter account last December in eight languages, including Arabic. Soon, there were millions of followers.
Then letters started pouring in asking why the pope wasn't tweeting in the official language of the Vatican.
When the Latin account was launched in January, Vatican officials didn't expect more than 5,000 Latin nerds, that is, followers. But by May, it had surpassed Polish and was in a tie with German at more than 100,000.
Adducit nos Christus ut ex nobismet plus excedentes plusque ipsi dedamur aliis aliis famulemur.
— Papa Franciscus (@Pontifex_ln) June 4, 2013
NPR's Uri Berliner is taking $5,000 of his own savings and putting it to work. Though he's no financial whiz or guru, he's exploring different types of investments — alternatives that may fare better than staying in a savings account that's not keeping up with inflation.
If you go onto a site like Artnet or Saatchi Online, you can shop for art by price, style or even size. It's not that different from buying a mutual fund on the Web. This suits Cappy Price just fine. She's a former Wall Street portfolio manager who now consults with clients about art as an alternative asset. She loves art for its beauty, but she also says it's an investable asset — one that wasn't really accessible to ordinary people until recently.
"The Internet is driving the ability of the masses to do their own research, do their own due diligence just as they do with a stock — really enabling individuals to determine and place their own value on individual pieces of art," Price says.
Why invest in art? One reason, Price says, is that fine art has a proven track record as a good choice during hard times. "It outperforms in times of economic turmoil and trouble. It has outperformed during all of the wars of the 20th century. It's outperformed during the last 27 recessions."
Like any other asset, the market for art goes through ups and downs. Over the past 60 years, the total return on art has been very similar to the return on the S&P 500-stock index, says Mike Moses, a retired New York University business school professor who co-created the Mei Moses World All Art Index. The index tracks repeat auction sales of fine art.
"If you use the last 30 years, the S&P substantially outperforms art," Moses says. "If you look at the most recent eight [to] 10 years, art has outperformed the S&P."
For paintings in my price range — we're talking a few hundred dollars — there's no Mei Moses index, no record of auction sales to use as a guide. So I have no idea whether it's a smart move financially for me to buy art. But I do know this: Art is different than other investments. It's there in your house, part of your life.
"You are telling people something about yourself when you hang it," Moses says. "And therefore, I think that emotional investment gives you a certain tie to that work that you don't find in other objects that you buy."
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Faced with the threat of mutiny for what seems like the umpteenth time during his speakership, John Boehner moved to mollify fellow Republicans Tuesday, saying immigration legislation would need the support of a majority of the House GOP before it could be brought to a floor vote.
After emerging from a meeting with House Republicans, following days of warnings by conservatives that the Ohio Republican had better not try to pass an immigration bill with mostly Democratic votes, Boehner sought to calm the roiling Republican waters.
"I also suggested to our members today that any immigration reform bill that is going to go into law ought to have a majority of both parties' support if we're really serious about making that happen," he told reporters waiting outside the meeting room. "And so I don't see any way of bringing an immigration bill to the floor that doesn't have majority support of Republicans."
The practice of bringing to a floor vote only legislation supported by a majority of the party is known as the Hastert Rule. Denny Hastert, the Illinois Republican who was speaker from 1999 to 2007, mostly stuck to the practice of bringing to a vote only those bills with a "majority of the majority" supporting them. It was a good way to keep his political base in the House contented.
Boehner's words to the House GOP were meant to reassure Republicans opposed to provisions in the legislation the Senate is now considering - provisions that would create a citizenship pathway for people in the U.S. illegally.
In a clear shot across the bow of Boehner's speakership, on Monday Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California said in an interview that if the speaker let legislation reach the floor that a majority of House Republicans found objectionable, Boehner should be evicted from the speaker's office. Rohrabacher said:
"I would consider that a betrayal of the Republican members of the House and a betrayal of Republicans throughout the country. If Speaker Boehner moves forward and permits this to come to a vote even though a majority of Republicans in the House oppose whatever is coming to a vote, he should be removed as speaker."
That statement would be virtually impossible to spin, even in Washington, into anything less than a bald-faced threat.
In the past, Boehner has passed legislation most fellow House Republicans found odious, like the bill that averted the fiscal-cliff. It passed in January with just 85 of 241 Republicans voting for it, causing the speaker to rely on nearly unified Democratic support for passage.
Comments he made in a recent ABC News interview caused the latest bout of concern among Republicans. The speaker described revising the nation's immigration laws as his "top priority." That led some in the GOP to surmise that he would do anything to get a bill passed, even one most of them didn't like.
There were at least two other things worth noting about Boehner's Tuesday comments. One, he prepared the ground for the argument that Democrats would be to blame if immigration legislation should fail in the House.
Some Senate and House Republicans have argued that for any legislation to pass, it will have to have strong border enforcement measures whose positive results can be measured before any individuals now in the country illegally get the chance at citizenship. Democrats have generally balked at going as far on border-enforcement features.
Boehner said:
"... I just think the White House and Senate Democrats ought to get very serious. We know that border security is absolutely essential, that — if we're going to give people confidence that we can do the rest of what's being suggested. And I frankly think that the Senate bill is weak on border security. I think the internal enforcement mechanisms are weak and the triggers are almost laughable.
"And so if they're serious about getting an immigration bill finished, I think the president and Senate Democrats ought to reach out to their Democrat — Republican colleagues to build broad bipartisan support for the bill."