US stock markets climbed steadily, if unspectacularly, this week, nearing three-year highs despite worry over rising oil prices and Europe’s slow boil debt crisis.
“Stocks were in a bear market from October 2007 until March 2009,” said Beth Ann Bovino of Standard & Poor’s (S&P). “They have now recovered much of those losses.”
The holiday-shortened week saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average hover above the symbolic threshold of 13,000 points, helping add to confidence about the growing economy and falling unemployment.
At the end of the week, the Dow was up 0.3 percent at 12,982.95 points. The NASDAQ rose 0.4 percent and the S&P 500 rose 0.3 percent.
“A stronger job market is helping the US weather headwinds from both home and abroad,” said economists at Nomura, a Japanese bank.
One of those headwinds is higher oil prices, which have been rising on tensions in Iran.
While prices have been on the rise for some time, there was renewed focus this week as US politicians talked extensively about what can be done to stem the rise in this election year.
“Oil prices are on the rise again and concerns are growing about their impact on the recovery,” IHS Global Insight economists Paul Edelstein said.
“The situation is reminiscent of early-2011, when Brent oil prices reached US$126 a barrel, creating a growth pocket in the middle of the year,” he said.
“If oil prices stay persistently high or continue to rise, growth forecasts will likely be revised downward, but it would take a much bigger spike in prices to sink the US economy back into recession,” he said.
Higher oil prices spelled a boon for the oil majors. ExxonMobil was up 2 percent for the week, and Chevron was up 2.3 percent
Airlines got the raw end of that trade. US Airways plunged 21 percent, United Continental 13 percent and Delta 12 percent for the week.
In other sectors Wal-Mart saw steep declines, down 5.9 percent following disappointing quarterly earnings. Hewlett-Packard suffered a nearly 10 percent drop after reporting a 44 percent profit fall in its fiscal first quarter.
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],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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