Los Angeles Times - 13.11.2019

C4 WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2019 LATIMES.COM/BUSINESS

from 2017, according to the
travel trade group.
But travel industry lead-
ers worry that a security
measure that blocks nearly
4 in 10 U.S. adults from
boarding commercial
flights could derail that
growth.
In hopes of avoiding that
catastrophe, the U.S. Travel
Assn. is pushing airlines to
post direct warnings to trav-
elers about the new require-
ment, including notices to
each flier who tries to book a
flight on or after Oct. 1.
American Airlines,
United Airlines, Delta Air
Lines and Alaska Airlines
have all begun to sell tickets
for flights on or after Oct. 1.
Other carriers, such as Jet-
Blue and Southwest, have
yet to begin booking flights
that far into the future.
But United, Delta and
Alaska don’t include a warn-
ing about the requirement
in their online booking sites.
Representatives for the
three airlines say the
carriers plan to post notices
as the deadline gets closer.
“We will communicate
more with our customers as
we move towards Oct. 1,”
United Airlines spokesman
Charles Hobart said.
Alaska wrote about the
deadline on its blog site and
airline spokesman Ray Lane
said the carrier plans to
spread the word in the fu-
ture. “Our aim is to start do-
ing even more after we get
through the holidays,” he
said.
American, however, has
taken a more proactive ap-
proach, adding warnings
about the new security mea-
sure at several places on its
website, including its book-
ing page.
A link on the booking
page, titled “ID require-
ments are changing” opens
to another page that
explains the Oct. 1 deadline
for the Real ID requirement,
along with another link to a
U.S. Department of Home-
land Security webpage with
more information.
Airlines for America, a
trade group for the coun-
try’s largest carriers, said
airlines are trying to get the
word out about the require-
ment through websites, in-
flight magazines, social me-
dia and videos on their in-
flight entertainment sys-
tems.
“We are committed to
keeping up the momentum
in educating the public to
ensure that the 2.4 million
people who travel every day
will be able to flow through
the system as seamlessly as
possible next October,” the
trade group said in a state-
ment.
Airlines representatives
say the carriers have no way

of determining whether someone has valid identification before it sells him or her a ticket. Barnes wants airlines to do more immediately rather than waiting until closer to the kickoff date. “We need to be talking about it now and throughout next year,” she said. Congress passed the Real ID act in 2005, based on the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, to set a nationwide standard for state-issued identification cards and driver’s licenses. But the deadline to im- pose the changes on all 50 states has been postponed several times over the last few years. Forty-seven of the na- tion’s 50 states are now issu- ing the enhanced identification cards and driver’s licenses that comply with the new standards. The Real ID cards and license are identified with a gold or black star in the top right corner. Oregon and Oklahoma have been given extensions to comply with the law, and New Jersey’s ID is under re- view. The Department of Homeland Security issued a request Nov. 8 to private firms that do business with

the federal government for technologies that could streamline the process for applying for a Real ID card or license. The move opens the way for development of faster application online and the potential of carrying the enhanced identification on phones. In California, residents need to produce several forms of identification to obtain a Real ID card, including utility bills, a birth cer- tificate, a Social Security card or tax forms. The state will continue to issue traditional driver’s licenses or ID cards that can be renewed by mail, but those can’t be used to board a commercial plane starting O c t .1. Department of Motor Ve- hicles officials say they expect a rush of Californians trying to obtain the new identification card and enhanced driver’s licenses as the Oct. 1 deadline ap- proaches. “We are telling folks that they need to think ahead,” DMV spokesman Jaime Garza said. Americans who don’t have an enhanced ID card or license should take a look at the list of the required documents from the DMV website and make an ap-

pointment to present them at a DMV office, he said. A Real ID application takes about seven to 10 days to process. “Make sure you don’t leave on a flight Sept. 28 and can’t come home after Oct. 1 because you don’t have the proper documents,” Garza said. The Transportation Se- curity Administration, which for months has been posting signs about the requirement at airports across the country, doesn’t plan to delay the implemen- tation of the new require- ments again, TSA spokes- woman Lorie Dankers said. “The TSA does not encourage people to wait,” she said. “Waiting is not a good strategy.” The worst-case scenario, said Barnes of the travel trade group, is that Ameri- cans ignore the require- ments until next fall when more than 80,000 Americans who don’t have the proper identification documents show up at airports across the country to travel for the Thanksgiving holiday only to be turned away. “Think of all the other negative impacts, not only to the airlines but to hotels and rental car agencies,” she said.

Real ID deadline is coming in 2020

ONEof three types of identification will be required of fliers. Above, TSA workers check people at New York’s LaGuardia Airport in 2016.

Seth Wenig Associated Press

[Real ID,from C1]

Stocks on Wall Street closed nearly flat Tuesday after an early rally lost momentum toward the end of the day. The Nasdaq composite index still finished with its second record high in three days, while the Dow Jones industrial average ended at the same all-time high it set a day earlier. The Standard & Poor’s 500 crossed above the 3,100 level for the first time, plac- ing the index on track for its own milestone finish, but the gains didn’t hold. Still, the benchmark index re- bounded nearly all the way back from its Monday loss. “There was some excitement on breaking 3,100,” said JJ Kinahan, chief market strategist at TD Ameri- trade. “But we’ve had such an amazing two weeks that without any blockbuster news, it was going to be diffi- cult for us to continue higher.” President Trump gave an update Tuesday on trade ne- gotiations with China, say- ing both sides are close to a “Phase 1” deal. The markets didn’t react much to his re- marks. The S&P 500 rose 4.83 points, or 0.2%, to 3,091.84. The index, which is near the record high it set Friday, has notched gains the last five weeks. The Dow closed un- changed at 27,691.49 points. The Nasdaq rose 21.81 points, or 0.3%, to 8,486.09, a record. The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies inched up 0.35 of a point, or less than 0.1%, to 1,595.12. The market’s momentum has been mostly up- ward for more than five weeks as worries about the U.S.-China trade war have eased, among other factors. The rising confidence in markets has meant fewer buyers piling into the safety of gold, which dropped Tuesday to its lowest price in more than three months. Treasury yields fell slightly after trading re- sumed after Monday’s holiday in observance of Veter- ans Day. The yield on the 10-

year Treasury note slipped to 1.92% from 1.93%. It was below 1.50% in early Septem- ber and has been rallying with confidence in the economy’s strength. Reports have shown that the job market is still grow- ing, which should help households keep spending at a strong clip. Such spending makes up the bulk of the economy, and the expecta- tion is that it can more than make up for the weakness in manufacturing that the trade war is causing. “That’s the next thing we look for,” Kinahan said, not- ing that Black Friday, tradi- tionally one of the busiest shopping days of the year, is only a couple of weeks away. “Expectations are really high for spending. So, does the consumer live up to it?” Healthcare, technology and communication serv- ices stocks led the gainers Tuesday, outweighing losses in energy companies and elsewhere. Disney rose 1.3% on the day that its streaming video service, Disney+, launched. The service had some tech- nical difficulties in the morn- ing, an indication that de- mand may have been higher than expected. Rockwell Automation jumped 10.5% — one of the biggest gains in the S&P 500 — after the company reported earnings that were better than expected. Advance Auto Parts skidded 7.5% after cutting its full-year estimates for sales and income. Across the S&P 500, companies are on track to report a 2.4% drop in third-quarter earnings per share com- pared with a year earlier. That’s not as bad as the 4% decline analysts initially expected, according to Fact- Set. About 90% of the companies in the S&P 500 have reported their results so far. It’s a busy week for econo- mic data. The U.S. Labor Department will give up- dates on consumer and wholesale inflation. Econo- mists expect a government report to show that retail sales returned to growth in October. Gold fell $3.40 to $1,451.10 an ounce.

Index Dow industrials S&P 500 Nasdaq composite S&P 400 Russell 2000 EuroStoxx 50 Nikkei(Japan) Hang Seng(Hong Kong)

Close

Daily change

Daily % YTD %

27,691.49 — — +18.71 3,091.84 +4.83 +0.16 +23.34 8,486.09 +21.81 +0.26 +27.89 1,990.99 -3.47 -0.17 +19.72 1,595.12 +0.35 +0.02 +18.28 3,350.65 +14.00 +0.42 +21.40 23,520.01 +188.17 +0.81 +17.51 27,065.28 +138.73 +0.52 +4.83

Major stock indexes

change change

Associated Press

MARKET ROUNDUP

S&P 500 tops

3,100 mark, but

gains don’t hold

associated press

are aimed at more affluent
buyers.
Only seven of the approx-
imately 45 new electrics that
are planned for introduction
between now and 2023 will
cost less than $40,000 before
options are added on, ac-
cording to EVAdoption.
More than 30 of the new
models will be priced above
$60,000, and a few will top
$200,000.
Changes in incentives
probably won’t influence
sales of high-priced vehicles
being introduced by brands
such as Porsche. The
Porsche Taycan electric
sports sedan, soon to hit
showrooms, starts at
$150,000. Porsche spokes-
man Calvin Kim said buyers
of six-figure vehicles are
drawn more by a luxury
brand than clean-car incen-
tives.
But pricing could get
tricky for cars that come in
near $60,000 before options.
The upcoming Volvo XC40
all-electric compact SUV is
expected to sell in the mid-
$50,000 range.
Assemblyman Phil Ting
(D-San Francisco), who has
been a vocal advocate of
electric-car rebates in the
Legislature, said reducing
the rebate from $2,500 may
“dampen the excitement for
clean cars,” especially be-
cause Tesla and General
Motors are losing their fed-
eral tax credits.
Customers get a $7,500
federal tax credit for new all-
electric vehicles, but that
credit winds down gradually
to zero as car manufacturers
sell more vehicles, and it dis-
appears completely once
sales volume hits 200,000 ve-
hicles.

The credit for a new Tesla has dwindled to $1,875 and will disappear in January. General Motors, which sells the Chevy Bolt, will see its $1,875 rebate reduced to zero March 31. Ting believes that rebates should be increased overall, not decreased. He said that people with lower incomes tend to buy used cars, and that the state should bolster used-car pro- grams such as Clean Cars 4 All and Clean Vehicle Assist- ance Program instead of cutting rebates in the Clean Ve- hicle Rebate Project, which is primarily for new cars. Ting said he would put further restrictions on plug- in hybrids in order to free up resources for bigger rebates on electric vehicles.

“Why are we rebating technology that’s in the past at the expense of encourag- ing completely clean vehicles?” Ting said. Dan Edmunds, director of vehicle evaluations at au- tomobile information site Edmunds, agreed that increased restrictions on low- range plug-in hybrids were overdue. He said the market is full of plug-in hybrids with ranges of 20 miles when in electric mode, which he doesn’t think makes them viable vehicles. “The idea should be to have enough range that they can be an electric car for your commute to work and a gasoline engine for your longer trips on the weekend, but they aren’t configured with the range to do that,”

Edmunds said. “I’m not sorry to see those go, frankly.” Edmunds said more af- fordable electric vehicles are hitting the market. Hyundai sells the all-electric Ioniq for about $32,000 before incentives, and a $30,000 electric Mini Cooper is coming soon. That should give buyers more options, he said. He said rebates will encourage those who have never owned an electric car to make the switch. “I think focusing our ef- forts on first-time buyers at a more entry-level price point isn’t a bad thing,” Ed- munds said.

Times staff writer Russ Mitchell contributed to this report.

Electric car rebates reined in

[Cars, from C1]

CALIFORNIA’Srebate program as of Dec. 3 will no longer apply to vehicles that cost more than $60,000 nor those with an all-electric range of less than 35 miles.

Justin SullivanGetty Images

Los Angeles Times - 13.11.2019

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