Friday, Feb 02, 2007
All time high for the Dow
BBC News: Dow Jones closes at record high
The Dow Jones Industrial Average index closed at a record high after strong earnings and investor confidence that interest rates are stable. The Dow closed 51.99 points up at 12,673.68, after earlier hitting a new intra-day record of 12,682.57.
Posted by Webmaster @ 07:07 AM (151 views) Add Comment
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1. Orwell said...
Check this out its more interesting and Grahm Serjeant (Times) is quite sharp !
Pay settlements sound warning for MPC
Graham Searjeant, Financial Editor
Pay settlements in the three months to January 31 have delivered the biggest average UK pay rises in nearly six years, raising fears that last year’s surge in energy prices will be converted into permanently higher inflation.
Median pay deals monitored by Incomes Data Services (IDS), the pay consultant, rose from 3.05 per cent in December to 3.5 per cent last month.
Median settlements had been close to 3 per cent through most of 2006, while average earnings, including bonuses, rose by 4.1 per cent in the year to November.
The Retail Prices Index, which is widely used in pay negotiations, rose by 4.4 per cent in 2006, a 15-year high. This ensured that long-term deals promising inflation-linked rises this year are likely to result in earnings going up at a rate that will alarm the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee. Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, has made clear that last month’s rise in Bank Rate was a warning to wage bargainers. IDS said that the last time median pay rises reached 3.5 per cent for any prolonged period was in 1998, when inflation reached 4.2 per cent at the beginning of the MPC’s operations. Ken Mulkearn of IDS said that if inflation stayed high until spring, “we should expect to see a further pickup in pay settlements during the first four months of 2007”.
Karen Ward, of HSBC, argued, however, that most of the offending pay deals had been in manufacturing, where they were likely to be fully covered by productivity gains.
Output in the UK manufacturing industry picked up further in January instead of relapsing under the weight of some of the highest sterling exchange rates for many years. The Purchasing Managers Index for the sector edged up from 52.0 to 52.8, confounding expectations of a fall. Readings above 50 signal expansion. The orders index went up from 53.2 in December to 54.2, while export orders climbed from 51.8 to 53.4.
The drawback is that costs and prices are rising more strongly. The index of output prices rose from 53.5 to 54.2 on a resurgence of materials costs, another warning for the MPC.