Tag Archives: NPR

Car Talk Hosts Announce Retirement After 25 Years on NPR

Car Talk fans were saddened to hear last week that hosts Tom Magliozzi and Ray Magliozzi will retire this September. The popular radio show, a mix of humor and car advice, has been running for 25 years on NPR and before that had a run on the Boston NPR affiliate WBUR.

Tom and Ray, also known as “Click and Clack,” have expressed their love for the show and appreciation for their fans and listeners. Since Tom’s 75th birthday, however, the brother duo started thinking about taking time to “smell the cappuccino.”

Car Talk will stop recording new shows after October, but Tom and Ray want their fans to know that the show will continue thanks to hours of archived material. “The good news is that, despite our general incompetence, we actually remembered to hit the ‘record’ button every week for the last 25 years,” Tom joked. “So we have more than 1,200 programs we’re going to dig into starting this fall, and the series will continue.”

Tom and Ray first started working together on the do-it-yourself auto repair shop Hacker’s Haven, and they were invited to participate on an automotive panel hosted by WBUR. Not long after, they were given their own automotive advice show, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Episodes of the series are available to download free on iTunes under NPR: Car Talk Podcast or on the official Car Talk website.

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Freddie Mac Making Homeloans Difficult

According to an article in MSN’s Bottom Line tells people of what was found by an investigation of ProPublica and NPR into Freddie Mac. This investigation discovered that Freddie Mac has invested in financial instruments that profit when homeowners are stuck in high-interest mortgages.

What makes this such terrible news is that Freddie Mac is supposed to be the ones dedicated to backstopping mortgages, they are supposed to be making it easier for people to be getting home loans. When the government bailed the troubled company out in 2010, one of the requirements was that they get rid of all of their riskier investments. They apparently didn’t do that, however, and have doubled down on securities when homeowners lose.

To make matters even worse, Freddie Mac has been making it harder for homeowners to get credit and has even been raising fees for refinancing. It’s getting so bad that the Federal Reserve has said about the fees for both Freddie Mac and sister company Fannie Mae, “difficult to justify.”

When homeowners lose, when they can’t get refinanced to lower rates, it damages the economy. According to the research company Corelogic, there are around 11 million homes underwater just last year. If there is one person who is benefiting greatly from that number, it’s definitely not the homeowners, but it just so happens that the head of the trading division at Freddie Mac, Peter Federico, is. In 2010 he was paid 2.5 million and in 2011, he’s up to make even more.

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