Americans relied less on borrowed money in April than they did in March a sign that the pullback on debt-fueled spending continued into the spring. New data from the Federal Reserve shows that outstanding consumer credit which includes credit cards, auto loans and tuition financing, but not mortgages, fell by $15.7 billion to $2.52 trillion, an annualized drop of 7.4%. That marks the second-largest dollar drop on record, following March's $16.6 billion decline. ...

(CNN) -- Here is a look at the resume and record of federal Judge Sonia Sotomayor, whom President Barack Obama has chosen as his nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court. • Age 54 (Born June 25, 1954, New York City) Judicial Career • U.S. Appeals Court judge, 2nd Circuit, 1998-present • U.S. District Court judge, 1992-1998 • Nominated to federal bench by Bush in 1991, Clinton in 1997 Government/Legal Career • Former N.Y. County Assistant District Attorney, ...

Financial stocks — banks, brokers, asset managers — led the stock market down earlier this year, and almost left the stage as many shares sank into single digits. In recent weeks, however, the group has reversed course, rallying strongly, and even led the market to a robust gain on Monday, with the Dow rising 235 points. So is this the sign of a true financial-stock recovery, or a seductive bear trap? TIME contributing editor John Curran caught up with ...

Decades-old time off given women for pregnancy leave cannot be counted when deciding pension eligibility, the Supreme Court decided Monday. The ruling is a setback for a relatively small class of women, many in or approaching retirement, who took maternity leave before a federal law went into effect prohibiting workplace discrimination. That 1979 statute, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, said companies had to treat such time off just like any disability, and it would be credited toward retirement. The question was ...

Buried on page 795 of President Obama's budget, released last Thursday, is a paragraph banning the federal funding of needle-exchange programs for drug addicts — an apparent about-face on his campaign promise to overturn that longstanding ban. To the further consternation of AIDS and addiction activists, a statement of support for needle exchange was recently removed from the White House website. Is Obama reversing course? The Administration says no. Responding by email, Jeff Crowley, director of the White ...

Lobbying may be the one remaining recession-proof industry, and as Washington prepares for a summer-long debate over how to reform health care, lobbyists for every conceivable interest group have camped out in congressional anterooms to press their case. There are advocates for doctors, insurance companies, patients, nurses, pharmaceutical companies, big business and small business. And for faith healers too. Of course, they wouldn't call themselves "faith healers." They ...

The problem with the credit-card industry isn't just the credit-card companies — it's you, too. This week the Senate takes up a bill that would seriously clamp down on some of the industry's most unsavory practices, a piece of legislation that President Obama has said he wants on his desk by the end of the month. The bill, which builds on rules issued by the Federal Reserve Board and other agencies at the end of last year, would do away ...

From his earliest days as Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner's biggest challenge has been restoring confidence in America's fragile banks without taking the politically costly step of asking Congress for more money. To judge by the results of the government-run stress tests released Thursday afternoon, Geithner has somehow pulled it off — at least for now. Not that three months of supervisory scrutiny of the country's top 19 banks hasn't produced some grim news. If the economy dropped to Depression-era levels ...

The first tweet the White House Twittered was not about the weather. It had nothing to do with how the President was feeling, what he was doing or what he wanted for lunch. The First Dog, Bo, failed to receive even an oblique mention. Instead, the Obama Administration jumped with both feet into the 140-character Twitterverse on May 1 with a one-sentence post on how Americans can learn about swine flu directly by joining social networks with the Centers for Disease Control and ...

A German court Wednesday rejected an effort by suspected Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk to block his expected transfer from the United States to Germany. The ruling came as Demjanjuk's lawyers formally asked the U.S. Supreme Court to halt the deportation. The Administrative Court in Berlin ruled that Demjanjuk lacks a basis for legal protection and declared his motion for a stay to be inadmissible. "Even without the agreement of the Federal (German) Government, he could be deported from the ...