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...have made muni bonds more attractive to pension funds and other nonprofit (i.e., tax-free) investors. And that new demand is driving down the yields on traditional muni bonds because there are relatively fewer of them issued. BABs, unlike traditional munis, are taxable. For most individual investors, the interest-rate difference is a wash - a high net worth investor would owe the extra yield they get from the BAB back in taxes, so they'd wind up with roughly the same after-tax yield as if they had bought a lower-yielding tax-free muni...
...Small-business company sales fell 3.8% on average in the first 10 months of 2009, which reverses the 2.4% gain posted in 2008, according to Sageworks, which provides software and consulting services to private business. "That's almost a 6% decline in the sales growth rate," says Andrew White, the firm's chief financial officer. Large publicly traded companies fared better, with sales slipping only 1.8% on average in the first 10 months of the year, he says...
...small businesses train or hire employees, that's going to impact the jobless rate," concurs White...
Cancer doctors are also worried that insurance companies will use the panel's new recommendations as an excuse to stop paying for mammography in younger women. Since 2002, when most professional organizations urged annual mammograms for women between 40 and 49 years old, the breast-cancer mortality rate in that group has steadily dropped, by about 3% a year, owing in large part to enhanced screening; doctors were able to pick up and treat cases of disease earlier...
...second straight year, the U.S. earned dismal marks in its effort to reduce the national rate of premature births. The March of Dimes, which issues an annual state-by-state report card on the problem, gave the U.S. an overall D on Monday...