low interest rates

Thanks to record-low interest rates, consumers with good credit can get 30-year fixed-rate mortgages for about 3.75%. But that's sky high compared to the 0.75% interest IBM is going to pay $900 million worth of corporate bonds.

Millions of homeowners have garnered huge savings in recent years from one simple move: refinancing their mortgages. Now, the refinancing craze has spread to an unexpected industry: car loans. Could an auto refi be a smart move for you?

Remember Bank Transfer Day? Well, mark your calendar: Dec. 11 is being publicized as "Balance Transfer Day," with Americans urged to transfer their credit card balances from high-interest cards to low- or no-interest ones.

A retiree named Bob is confronting a dilemma many of his peers face: His nest egg is parked in safe cash investments, like certificates of deposit, and earning barely any interest. What can he do to get a better return? Laura Rowley looks at an increasingly popular alternative.

A few years ago, with $1 million invested in CDs, you could have lived off your interest, but with rates at historic lows, now your returns would barely cover a few mortgage payments. This is forcing retirees to find new, fairly safe ways to get those returns. The experts' pick? Dividend stocks.

With the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage down to 4.09%, -- another record low -- it's a great time to refinance. But before you go running off to your lender to catch the best rates since 1951, avoid making these major mistakes that can cost you dearly.

Here's the good news: American consumers are finally starting to reduce their reliance on credit and pay off their high-interest debt -- a positive development for their financial futures. The bad news: More money in people's pockets means less overall spending in the economy, which desperately needs the cash right now. How might the tension be resolved?

With the historically low interest rates, many homeowners with 30-year mortgages have been leaving their loans for younger models. According to a new report from Freddie Mac, more homeowners are refinancing into 15- and 20-year mortgages than ever before.

Interest rates are the price of money, and though that price is near zero right now, the cost of low interest rates to our nation may be too high. Low rates are squeezing savers, seniors, banks and pension funds, and the benefits we're supposed to see from them don't appear to have arrived.

When QE2 is complete, the Fed's bond purchases will have injected $1.7 trillion in liquidity into the markets since 2008 in an effort to boost corporate investment in new production and new jobs in the U.S. Instead, companies are taking cash raised here and investing it in emerging markets.