Time for fireworks: Dow tops 17,000!

By Melvin Backman  @ CNNMoneyInvest July 3, 2014: 1:19 PM ET

 

NEW YORK (CNNMoney)

 

U.S. stock markets closed at 1 p.m. Thursday, but they got the fireworks going early. The Dow finally hit 17,000!Many see it as just a psychological threshold, but it's a level U.S. stocks have never seen before, and it comes a mere six months after the Dow crossed 16,000.

 

All three major indexes closed higher Thursday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished at an all-time high of around 17,068 (up nearly 1.3% for the week). The S&P 500 also closed at a record level, hitting 1,985 for the first time. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite rounded up the week up 2%.

 

Here are the highlights of a great week:

 

Jobs Bonanza: A strong June job reports drove the optimism in the stock market. The U.S. economy added 288,000 jobs last month, and the unemployment rate fell to 6.1%, down from 6.3% in May. That was much better than economists or Wall Street expected.

 

Treasuries react to jobs report: The bond market is moving to sell after the jobs report and Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen's comments yesterday that the central bank will not use interest rates to pop any potential bubbles in the markets. Bond yields are up to 2.64%, a sign of the improving economy.

 

Gold investors area bit skittish, with the precious metal's price dropping nearly 0.75% to around $1,321 an ounce.

 

Bow Wow -- PetSmart stock spikes: PetSmart (PETM) shares were howling at the moon, up 12.5% after hedge fund Jana Partners announced a 9.9% stake with intentions of exploring a sale of the company.

 

In other moves, embattled clothiers American Apparel (APP) and Lululemon (LULU) traded higher. Shares in the two are finished nearly 5% and almost 3% higher, respectively. There's a lot of news around American Apparel, where Reuters reports that former CEO Dov Charney has handed off his stake to hedge fund Standard General. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that former Lululemon chair and founder Chip Wilson is trying to take the company private.

 

Intel (INTC, Tech30) shares are up 20% so far this year, making it the second best performing stock in the Dow.

 

PCs aren't dead! Intel is soaring

Independence Dog: It's also fun to note that Nathan's Famous (NATH) hot dogs, sponsor of Coney Island's annual July 4 hot dog-eating contest, is a publicly traded company. The stock is down slightly Thursday, but it's up over 7% so far in 2014 and has truly been a "top dog" in recent years.

Overseas Markets: European markets are were higher in afternoon trading, with the FTSE 100 up more than 0.7%. Asian markets were mixed, and Australia's stock market jumped a nice 0.7%. 

New tools to fight tuberculosis and other chronic infections

News from European Commission - Research and Innovation

© sudok1 - Fotolia.com

A groundbreaking European research project focused on tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis and treatment has developed potentially life-saving novel drug candidates and new diagnostics for the condition.

TB is one of the world’s most persistent diseases, and even today, despite medical advances, it still claims around 1.45 million lives worldwide each year. A key reason TB is still a menace is inadequate diagnosis and the ability of the TB-pathogen to adapt to antibiotics. Its drug resistance is a public health problem that threatens progress made in TB care and control worldwide.

The project, NOPERSIST, applied advances in molecular biology and the sequencing of TB genomes (the genetic material of an organism) to better understand the disease and other infections such as HIV.

The research team used novel strategies that could lead to efficient and accurate TB diagnosis and treatment of other persistent infections. These results include the world's first blood test for active TB; a rapid, three-hour test for bovine TB; a novel drug cocktail candidate for multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB); a new drug candidate for TB; and molecular tests for diseases in pigs. NOPERSIST team also successfully developed a novel adjuvant – or vaccine booster - that could be widely used to create all kinds of vaccines, not only for TB.

The project’s breakthroughs are even more exceptional given that diagnoses of these infections are extremely difficult and time-consuming, and no efficient, cost effective tests have been available until now.

“NOPERSIST has been unusually innovative which is evident by the fact that five European patents have been filed out of the project,” says NOPERSIST’s project coordinator Prof. Mahavir Singh, from Lionex, a biotech company based in Brunswick, Germany.

Prof. Singh explains that much of the success was down to the application of medical advances in molecular biology and the availability of new information generated after sequencing the TB genome.

“Molecular biology and immunology helped significantly in discovering and developing novel biomarkers as a diagnostic test, as well as a novel adjuvant,” he says. “In addition, genome sequencing helped partners focus on veterinary diseases in cattle and swine. Tests based on genome sequencing results will shortly be developed for some veterinary diseases.”

Prof. Singh adds that with a diagnostic market of TB worth nearly €1 billion, NOPERSIST’s new leads could bring novel products on the market, delivering a major competitive advantage to European industry. “The new active TB tests have an excellent chance of becoming the major diagnostic tool for TB,” he says. Further research planned under the follow-up project, Demo-NOPERSIST, is expected to bring the diagnostic products on the market within the next 2-3 years.

Prof. Singh believes the project team has not merely learnt about the mechanisms of drug resistance in TB and improved current techniques for rapid detection, but it has also stimulated the exploration of new targets for drug activity and drug development. 

“NOPERSIST project was a good example of how a motivated research team performing a highly ambitious project with a small budget can really achieve its objectives, and have significant social and economic impact on human health in Europe and elsewhere,” he concludes.

Nearly nine million people around the world became sick with TB in 2011, according to the US-based Center for Disease Control and Prevention.Drug-resistant TB - which occurs when the bacteria develops the ability to withstand antibiotic attack - is difficult and costly to treat. It can be fatal, and an estimated 650,000 people worldwide have MDR-TB.

Note :

Project details

Project acronym: NOPERSIST

Participants: Germany (Coordinator), Sweden, UK, Switzerland, Hungary, Italy, Belgium, Spain

FP7 Proj. N° 232188

Total costs: € 1 714 410EU contribution: € 1 319 990

Duration: January 2010 - December 2012

MALAYSIAN ECONOMIC MONITOR - WORLD BANK

BOOSTING TRADE COMPETITIVENESS

Following the review of near-term developments and outlook, the thematic chapter of this Economic Monitor analyzes structural trends in trade competitiveness.

Trade competitiveness is measured as Malaysia’s ability to grow its exports and the domestic value-added embodied within them, leveraging foreign demand and knowledge to support its transformation to a high income nation.

Nearly 60 percent of value-added produced in Malaysia was ultimately consumed by foreigners in 2009 – one of the highest shares in the world.

The share of Malaysia’s GDP consumed in foreign markets includes the value-added of exporting firms and also of suppliers to export-oriented industries. Thus the actual significance of external demand to the Malaysian economy is higher than it appears from net exports (22 percent of GDP) or the output from externally-oriented industries (38 percent of GDP).

The export engine appears to have been faltering since before the Global Financial Crisis.

The share of exports of goods and services in Malaysia’s GDP declined by nearly 30 percentage points between 2005 and 2013. Unlike Thailand, Vietnam and Korea, which saw market shares expand, Malaysia’s share shrunk from 1.35 to 1.22 percent in that period. However, Malaysian exports have included a higher portion of domestic value-added, mitigating the impact of the decline in gross shares.

The decline in exports has been concentrated in Malaysia’s core export product segment – E&E products.

E&E exports as a share of GDP declined from about 38 percent between 2002 and 2004 to 18 percent in 2013, and Malaysia’s market share in the period declined from 5.25 percent to 3.74 percent of global E&E exports. Meanwhile, exports of commodities, and commodity-related manufactures such as petrochemicals expanded, but not enough to compensate the decline in E&E exports.

The domestic value-added of Malaysian E&E exports is relatively low due to limited domestic linkages.

Malaysia remains an integral part of the E&E global value chain, but at 44 percent the share of valueadded  in exports is relatively low. This is partly due to limited domestic linkages. Compared to other countries, the contribution from domestic intermediaries to the value-added of exports is only 7 percent in Malaysia compared to 31 percent in Korea. This finding is supported by analysis of enterprise survey data, which finds that multinationals in Malaysia source less than 40 percent of their inputs from domestic firms compared to 46 percent in Vietnam and 82 percent in China.

Exports of services have also lagged and remain an area of significant potential.

Malaysia has few services-exporting firms and at 12 percent of GDP services exports are below what would  be expected for a country at its level of income.

‘Behind the borders’ restrictions hinders export growth and limits linkages between domestic providers and export-oriented industries.

Although the Government has recently embarked on a liberalization of services  sectors, many are still relatively restrictive as measured by the World Bank’s Services Trade. Restrictiveness index and assessment of the burden of non-tariff measures. Professional and transport services are more restrictive on average than most countries in East Asia for example. A restrictive domestic environment reduces incentives for exporting, and for exporting firms to buy more domestic value-added. Barriers are not limited to ownership restrictions, but extend to licensing and regulations that limit domestic competition.

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