U.S. stocks ended mixed Tuesday, as investors welcomed a compromise between President Barack Obama and Republican lawmakers that would extend the Bush-era tax cuts for two years. U.S. stocks were higher for most of the day, but the gains faded late in the day after Obama, who had wanted the tax cuts for high-earning taxpayers to expire, said in a press conference that he would push to have them eliminated after the two-year extension was over. In company news, Bank of America agreed to pay $137 million in fines to federal and state regulators to settle charges in sales fraud in the municipal bond derivatives market. Meanwhile, the Treasury Department said Monday afternoon it planned to sell 2.4 billion Citi common shares, giving the government a $12 billion profit on its $45 billion Citi federal aid fund. In other U.S. economic news, a report on consumer credit is forecast to show a decline of $2.5 billion in October, following a gain of $2.1 billion in the previous month. The U.S. dollar gained against the euro and the yen. Light sweet crude oil for January delivery fell 69 cents to $88.69 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Gold futures fell $7.10 to $1,409 an ounce. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 3.03, or 0.0 percent, to 11,359.16. The broader Standard & Poor's 500 index rose 0.63, or 0.1 percent, to 1,223.75. The technology-heavy Nasdaq composite index rose 3.57, or 0.1 percent, to 2,598.49.
