F ederal regulators on Wednesday imposed new curbs on the practice of short-selling, hoping to prevent spiralling sales sprees in a stock that can stoke market turmoil. The Securities and Exchange Commission, divided along party lines, voted 3-2 at a public meeting to adopt new rules. The rules put in a so-called circuit breaker for stock prices, restricting for the rest of a trading session and the next one any short-selling of a stock that has dropped 10 per cent or more. Short sellers bet against a stock, in a practice that is legal and widely used on Wall Street. They borrow a company’s shares, sell them and then buy them when the stock falls and return them to the lender – pocketing the difference in price. The SEC move followed months of wrestling with the controversial issue. The SEC asked for public comment last April on several alternative…

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U .S. Transportation secretary Ray LaHood has vowed to get to the bottom of persistent complaints that faulty electronics may be causing some Toyota vehicles to speed wildly out of control. “We will get in the weeds on this to find out if electronics are part of the problem,” Mr. LaHood said Wednesday at a Congressional hearing probing safety problems involving millions of Toyota cars. “We are going to work until every Toyota is safe to drive.” His comments came as Toyota Motor Corp. TM-N president Akio Toyoda prepared to publicly apologize to Congress for safety problems that have triggered the recall of 8.5-million vehicles in recent months. Toyota has acknowledged that the recalls – to fix floor mats and gas pedals – may not address all of the complaints from drivers. But the car maker has denied its vehicles’ electronics…

P ersonal finance writer Gail Bebee and the winner of our investing quiz, whom we can identify only as Steve, are into their fourth, and final, week of mentoring. In this final instalment of the new investor mentoring series, we’ll walk through the steps our iTrade contest winner Steve took to arrive at his decision on where to invest his $10,000 prize money. I’ve noted significant aspects of our mentoring discussions to give readers a feeling for some of the thinking that contributed to his conclusions. After reviewing his personal financial situation, Steve decided to set up a family emergency fund using $4,000 of his prize money and earmark the remainder for home renovations he is planning in three to five years. The two risk questionnaires he completed indicated that a 50-50 mix of lower and higher risk investments would suit his appetite for risk. He realized that while he…

B rookfield Asset Management BAM.A-T has struck a friendly agreement with General Growth Properties Inc. to acquire a minority stake in the troubled shopping mall operator for $2.63-billion (U.S.). The complex multistep plan calls for General Growth to spin off the majority of its healthiest 200 malls into a new company that would be about 30 per cent owned by Brookfield. A small pool of about 30 underperforming malls would be transferred to a separate company that would be owned by creditors holding mortgages on the properties. General Growth said in a statement that Brookfield’s planned investment gives the company an equity value of about $4.5-billion, vaulting the offer well above an all-cash $3-billion plan revealed by Simon Property Group Inc. SPG-N Brookfield’s acquisition plan calls for General Growth to issue waves of new equity to raise cash to repay some of the company’s…