European investors will hope for more positive news on the distressed US property market in the week ahead as they seek to build on Friday's partial stock market recovery.
With a little help from the US Federal Reserve, markets in London and Frankfurt jumped into positive territory on Friday following a week's stormy trading.
In a move aimed at tackling fears of a global credit crunch, the US central bank slashed the lending rate it charges commercial banks by 50 basis points to 5.75 percent.
London's FTSE 100 index of leading shares finished Friday at 6,064.20 points, a gain of 25.90 points or 0.42 percent from a week earlier. That followed a plunge of 2.99 percent the previous week.
This week's rise was all the more impressive because the FTSE had nosedived on Thursday by 4.10 percent -- the biggest daily drop since March 12, 2003 in the run-up to the US-led war in Iraq.
Elsewhere on Friday, Frankfurt's DAX 30 added 0.48 percent over the week to finish at 7,378.29 points.
In Paris, however, the CAC 40 index shed 1.56 percent in value to 5,363.63 points after a loss of 2.67 percent the previous week.
With no end in sight to the ongoing US housing market crisis, analysts remained sceptical that the period of extreme stock market swings was over.
"There's no way that we can assume the recent volatility is now at an end," CMC Markets dealer Jimmy Yates said.
Traders are worried that more and more banks and investment funds around the world will reveal the total extent of their losses from troubles in the US subprime or high-risk home loan sector, analysts said.
"There is no longer any complacency about exposure to the US subprime sector," Capital Economics analyst Julian Jessop said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained