The daily business briefing: April 4, 2017

Car sales sink, two advertisers ditch The O'Reilly Factor, and more

Bill O'Reilly on his Fox show
(Image credit: Getty Images)

1. Car sales fall, weighing on stocks

U.S. passenger vehicle sales dropped by 11 percent in March, the third straight monthly decline for domestic auto sales, Autodata reported on Monday. The industry sold 1.56 million vehicles last month, a 1.6 percent drop from last year. Analysts had expected a slight increase. Sales incentives rose by 13.4 percent to an average $3,511 per vehicle as automakers tried to move unsold inventory. "Going forward we'll see automakers likely cut production to manage inventories and to not go out of control with incentives," Autotrader analyst Michelle Krebs said. The news weighed on stocks. Electric car maker Tesla was an exception, rising and pushing its market value above No. 2 U.S. automaker Ford's for the first time.

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Harold Maass, The Week US

Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.