January 23, 1995

Prices for new cars and trucks have risen faster than most Americans' income in the last 20 years, and the auto companies are now embroiled in a debate over whether they are leaving too many customers behind. In recent months, average spending on a new car has exceeded $20,000 for the first time. That has produced healthy profits for the industry but also caused at least a few auto makers to begin looking for ways to make their vehicles less expensive.

Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, the mother of President John F. Kennedy and of two United States Senators, the wife of a fabulously wealthy businessman-ambassador and the matriarch of a family whose political triumphs and personal tragedies she carried with quiet dignity for 80 years, died yesterday at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, Mass. She was 104. Surrounded by family members at her rambling, white-shingled seaside home on Cape Cod, she died of complications from pneumonia at 5:30 P.M., her son, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, said. She had been in a wheelchair, partly paralyzed and mostly silent, since 1984, when she suffered the first of a series of debilitating strokes.

A failure by Congress to approve the $40 billion rescue package for Mexico would have far-reaching effects that would go far beyond America's relationship with its third-largest trading partner, economists and political analysts say. The vote may take place as early as this week. Should the measure fail, reaction in financial markets both here and abroad will almost certainly be negative. Equally profound, analysts say, would be the signal sent to the rest of the world about the manner in which the United States intends to conduct international economic policy.

If Congress approves a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced Federal budget, many state legislatures will probably ratify the measure quickly, but maybe too few to make it part of the Constitution. A state-by-state survey by correspondents of The New York Times found that some legislatures, afraid of the fiscal consequences, would most likely refuse to ratify the amendment and that the outlook was cloudy enough in others to raise considerable doubt that it will ever be adopted.

A top executive in Prudential Securities' retail sales department was informed on Friday that lawyers for the Securities and Exchange Commission plan to recommend civil charges against him, people with knowledge of the investigation said. The executive, Charles Grose, the firm's mid-Atlantic regional director, was immediately placed on a paid leave from Prudential to allow him time to answer the charges, Charles Perkins, a firm spokesman, said.