Five or 10 years from now, when the financial crisis has ended and housing prices are up smartly once more, we will look in the rearview mirror and realize that we missed a golden age for first-time home buyers.
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FOR anyone reading the headlines, the car-buying experience seems to have quickly gone from bad to worse. Finance companies have cut back on loans and become stingier with leases — if they are still leasing at all.
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Loans Are Available, but Equity Is Not Keeping Pace
Home-equity loans once used in at least […]

FOR anyone reading the headlines, the car-buying experience seems to have quickly gone from bad to worse. Finance companies have cut back on loans and become stingier with leases — if they are still leasing at all.
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Loans Are Available, but Equity Is Not Keeping Pace
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The American housing market, where the global economic crisis began, is far from hitting bottom.
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Home prices across much of the country are likely to fall through late 2009, economists say, and in some markets the trend could last even […]

Correction Appended

For many of the nation’s retailers, this is shaping up to be the most critical holiday season since the recession of the early 1980s. Chains that fare poorly could end up as ghosts of Christmases past.
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Kalim A. Bhatti for The New York Times

A Bon-Ton store at a mall […]

DETROIT — After enduring a brutal sales slump caused by high gas prices and a faltering economy, the last thing the American auto industry needed was a credit crisis.
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Chris Livingston for The New York Times

The lot at the Ritchey dealership in Daytona Beach, Fla.

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Chris Livingston for The […]

DETROIT — Like a gas-thirsty S.U.V. crawling to the pump, General Motors needs to fill up fast with cash.
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Despite a broad overhaul since 2006, the nation’s largest automaker may soon have to raise new operating capital to offset a steep decline in United […]

As automakers dropped their latest batch of awful sales numbers on the market on Tuesday, reinforcing the gloom spreading across the economy, the troubles confronting American workers seemed to intensify.
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Plummeting home prices have […]

Many policy makers and bankers said this credit mess was contained.
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Justin Lane/European Pressphoto Agency

Crude oil prices are up about 51 percent this year, settling at $140 a barrel Monday on the New York Mercantile Exchange, above, down 21 cents from Friday.

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DETROIT — General Motors, which has struggled to stop depending on big discounts to draw in customers, is pulling the sale banners out again.
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G. M. said on Monday that it would offer long-term, no-interest loans on most models through June 30. […]