Porsche&S217;s $17.2 billion of debt will be mostly eliminated after the sports-car maker completes its merger with Volkswagen, Martin Winterkorn, chief executive of both companies, said Friday.

&S220;By the time the merger is done, the level of more or less zero will certainly be reached,&S221; Mr. Winterkorn said.

Volkswagen and Porsche agreed in August to merge, ending a four-year feud for control. The accord was reached when debt at Porsche tripled to more than 10 billion euros in six months after the company&S217;s failed takeover of VW fast cash loans.

Deliveries by VW this year will &S220;slightly exceed&S221; the record level of 6.23 million vehicles for 2008, Mr. Winterkorn said in Stuttgart, Germany. Porsche will sell more than 76,000 cars in the current fiscal year, he said.

VW Merger Will Cut Porsche Debt

The dollar slid to a 15-month low against the euro Wednesday as investors fled the safe haven currency on upbeat economic reports.

On Wall Street, shares were slightly higher after the Federal Reserve indicated that interest rates would remain at super-low levels for a while yet and that it was not overly concerned by dollar&S217;s decline.

The euro climbed to $1.5077 in New York trading from $1.4975 late Tuesday, having earlier risen to $1.5096, its highest level since August 2008. The dollar fell to 87.56 Japanese yen from 88.56 yen, after earlier falling to 87.36 yen, its weakest level since January and close to 14-year lows.

The renewed slump in the dollar was driven largely by the publication Tuesday of the minutes to the Fed&S217;s last rate-setting meeting in November.

The Fed said at the time that it planned to keep interest rates at &S220;exceptionally low levels&S221; for an &S220;extended period&S221; &<51;currently the Fed funds rate stands at a range between zero and 0.25 percent -- and that the fall in the dollar had been &S220;orderly.&S221;

Currency traders seized on the reference to the dollar as the Fed is usually wary of talking about changes in currency values.

Stuart Bennett, senior foreign exchange strategist at Calyon Credit Agricole, said there was now a chance that the euro&S217;s breakthrough opened the way for a &S220;rapid&S221; move higher, especially if stocks remain well-bid &<51; for much of the past year, the dollar has moved in opposite direction to stocks.

As the dollar weakened, gold prices hit another record. Crude oil increased $1 to $77.02 a barrel.

On Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average rose 15 points, or 0.15 percent. The broader Standard &&8; Poor&S217;s 500-stock index rose 3.13 points, and the Nasdaq rose 5.78 points. Trading volume was thin ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday, which can exacerbate swings in the market low fee payday loans.

At an economic report, the government said new claims for unemployment insurance fell by 35,000 last week to 466,000. That was the fewest claims since September last year, and better than the 500,000 that economists had expected.

The drop in claims suggested that the job market was healing, but concern remains that the improvement will be temporary as the weak economy continues to push unemployment higher. The jobless rate hit 10.2 percent in October and many analysts believe it will keep rising before starting to improve next summer.

In other economic reports, new home sales rose 6.2 percent to an annual rate of 430,000. That was above what economists surveyed by Thomson Reuters had expected.

Separately, the government reported consumer spending rose a brisk 0.7 percent last month, following a 0.6 percent drop in September. It was the best showing since August, when the government&S217;s now-defunct Cash for Clunkers programs enticed people to buy cars.

Not all the day&S217;s news was upbeat. Orders for expensive manufactured goods dropped 0.6 percent last month, the first drop since August. Economists had expected orders would grow.

Doug Roberts, chief investment strategist at Channel Capital Research in Shrewsbury, N.J., said investors were still worried about the sustainability of a recovery but are afraid of missing more of the market&S217;s eight-month rally.

&S220;People may not believe in this market but they&S217;re reluctantly being pulled into it with each of these reports,&S221; Mr. Roberts said.

Overseas, Japan&S217;s Nikkei stock average rose 0.4 percent. In afternoon trading, Britain&S217;s FTSE 100 rose 0.8 percent, Germany&S217;s DAX index rose 0.6 percent, and France&S217;s CAC-40 rose 0.7 percent.

Dollar Continues Its Slide; Markets Rise