ONLINE News Briefs

Privacy: One call to banish phone pests? Maybe soon

Before long, you may be able to get rid of most telemarketing calls by putting your name and number on a national "do not call" list. The Federal Trade Commission has proposed creating a central registry. Once your number is on the list, it would be illegal for a telemarketer to call you. After placing your name on the registry, you could receive telemarketing sales calls from an individual company or organization only by authorizing the company to call you.

Insider Trading: The Internet may provide fuller disclosure

The public will get more-timely notice when company executives start dumping their stocks if a bill currently proposed in the Senate is passed. The Fully Informed Investor Act, introduced by Sen. Jean Carnahan (D-MO), would require company officials to file disclosure forms electronically when they sell shares in the company’s stock. The forms would be available to the public at the Web site maintained by the Securities and Exchange Commission (www.sec.gov) and at the company’s Web site.

Company officials currently must file disclosure forms when they sell company stock, but most are filed on paper and are not easily accessible to the average investor. The bill is under consideration by the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.

College: Interest rates for student loans will freeze in 2006

If your children are still a few years away from college, they don’t have to worry that by the time they need tuition money, inflation will have pushed up the interest rate on student loans. A bill passed by Congress sets interest rates at 6.8 percent for new loans beginning July 1, 2006, and freezes the rate for the life of the loans. Under the current formula, which remains in effect until then, the interest rates change every year on July 1, with a limit of 8.25 percent. The current rate, which was set last July at 5.99 percent, is the lowest it has been in decades. (See Financial Beat, September 17, 2001.)

Yvonne Wollenberg. ONLINE News Briefs.

Medical Economics

2002;6.