National business briefs for Feb. 22

New credit-card accounts rise 14% in 2011

More people opened new credit-card accounts last year as the banking industry began to loosen standards it tightened during the recession.

The number of new cards issued to consumers rose 14 percent in 2011 to about 42.3 million, according to data provided by TransUnion. And about a quarter of those cards — roughly 10.7 million — went to people with less-than-stellar credit histories, Trans-

Union said.

The combination of tight competition for top-rated consumers with improvement in the economy is encouraging banks to take a closer look at lending to consumers who made a few mistakes in the past. This is the second straight quarter that subprime consumers are getting a larger slice of the credit pie than they did during the depth of the Great Recession.

Rates drop on short-term Treasury bills

The rates on three-month and six-month Treasury bills dropped in Tuesday's auction after rising the previous week.

The Treasury Department auctioned $33 billion in three-month bills at a discount rate of 0.085 percent, down from 0.095 percent last week. Another $31 billion in six-month bills was auctioned at a discount rate of 0.125 percent, down from 0.130 percent last week.

The three-month rate was the lowest since three-month bills averaged 0.08 percent on Feb. 6. The six-month rate was the lowest since these bills averaged 0.10 percent, also on Feb. 6.

Separately, the Federal Reserve said Monday that the average yield for one-year Treasury bills, a popular index for making changes in adjustable rate mortgages, rose to 0.17 percent last week from 0.15 percent the previous week.

Phone scam bilked more than 10,000 in U.S.

A phone scam in which callers in India posed as debt collectors bilked millions of dollars out of more than 10,000 U.S. residents by using threats of arrest or the loss of their jobs, U.S. authorities said Tuesday in what they described as a first-of-its-kind investigation.

Callers drew on personal data snatched from payday loan websites, Federal Trade Commission official Steven Baker said. More than 20 million calls may have been placed over the past two years, with collectors demanding between $300 and $2,000 per call.

Such a far-reaching fraud with so many millions of calls flooding in from India is something investigators haven't seen before and was fostered in part by the plummeting costs of international calls, Baker said.

Elsewhere

• Federal safety regulators are investigating a problem with side air bags that may fail to inflate in a crash. The problem already has caused recalls of more than 2,700 Toyota, Honda, Subaru and Nissan vehicles, but that number could grow if the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration determines that more automakers used similar defective parts.

• Johnson & Johnson's longtime CEO, Bill Weldon, is stepping down as the health-care giant's top executive after an embarrassing string of recalls of everything from Tylenol to Benadryl that has cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars and consumers' trust. The company said Tuesday that Alex Gorsky, vice chairman and head of the company's largest business by revenue, will become CEO on April 26. Weldon, the CEO since 2002, will remain board chairman for the time being.

• Grubb & Ellis Co. said Tuesday that it has sought bankruptcy protection as part of a deal to sell most of its assets to the parent of rival commercial real estate services company Newmark Knight Frank. The proposed sale to BGC Partners Inc. comes as Grubb & Ellis struggles with mounting debt after posting operating losses for several years after the real estate downturn.

• AT&T Inc.'s board cut CEO Randall Stephenson's 2011 pay by $2.08 million because he engineered the failed deal to buy T-Mobile USA, according to a regulatory filing Tuesday. That meant it had to hand over $4.2 billion in cash and spectrum rights to T-Mobile as a so-called breakup fee to compensate T-Mobile for the failed deal.

From wire reports