Markets Rebound, Rising Almost 3%

The stock market roared back to life on Thursday, driving the Dow Jones industrial average firmly above 10,000, as investors latched on to hopes that maybe, just maybe, the economic scene was not quite as bleak as it seemed.

After weeks of violent swings, driven largely by concerns over the unfolding financial crisis in Europe, bargain-hunters swooped in. The broad stock market leapt almost 3 percent in its biggest one-day gain in two weeks.

For a day, at least, fears that the nation’s fragile economic recovery might falter were cast aside. A stream of upbeat economic reports overseas prompted some investors to reverse their bearish bets with a rush of buy orders.

But few investors or analysts seemed convinced that the market, down roughly 11 percent from its April highs, was finally out of the woods. Indeed, some suggested the gains might prove fleeting, given the nervousness pervading the markets.

“Investors are spooked very easily by the smallest negative news stories now, and it won’t take a lot for the Dow to be trading back to 10,000 as early as tomorrow,” said M. Jake Dollarhide, the chief executive of Longbow Asset Management.

Even before the opening bell sounded, it looked like a good day for Wall Street. Thursday’s rally began early, in Asian markets, and then spilled over into European trading. The United States market gathered momentum into the close of New York trading, as some traders reversed short positions, or bets that stocks would decline in value.

By the close, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 273.28 points, or 2.76 percent, at 10,172.53. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index rose 2.95 percent, or 31.15 points, to 1,086.84, while the Nasdaq was up 2.77 percent, or 59.86 points, to 2,218.71.

The rally was broad and swift. Energy shares led the charge. BP, which has lost nearly half its value since the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, jumped 10 percent. Only a day before, BP had plunged nearly 16 percent after lawmakers called on the company to suspend its dividends and its advertising to pay for the costs of the cleanup.

Driving the gains were several economic reports, mostly from overseas, that seemed to point to a sustainable global recovery. The European Central Bank slightly raised its forecast for economic growth in the euro zone this year, while the Japanese government reported that its economy grew 1.2 percent in the first quarter.

A stronger-than-expected employment report in Australia and news that New Zealand was confident enough in its economic prospects to raise interest rates added to the sense of optimism, as did better-than-expected results on weekly jobless claims in the United States.

Good news also came from China, in the form of surprisingly strong export figures. To some, the data — a trade surplus of $19.5 billion in May — suggested that China’s economy remained robust, despite troubles elsewhere in the world.

“China has been the economic juggernaut, and at least it’s not falling apart,” said Michael Fitzpatrick, vice president for energy at MF Global.

Others, however, insisted that the Chinese economy would ultimately slow down, posing a risk to growth worldwide.

“Whether it’s going to be a soft landing or hard landing — that to me is the most fundamental risk,” said Stephen P. Wood, market strategist for Russell Investors. “That’s really the big wild card.”

Mr. Wood said a slowdown in China was “inevitable.”

Indeed, many on Wall Street say they believe the economic outlook remains murky at best.

A report showing that weekly unemployment benefit rolls in the United States fell by 255,000 to a seasonally adjusted 4.5 million, the lowest total since December 2008, provided some relief to downbeat news of late. But the report was not enough to persuade economists that unemployment would decline markedly soon.

Scott J. Brown, chief economist of Raymond James, said the jobs numbers from Thursday and last Friday indicated a “long hard slog” ahead.

“The recovery should continue, but it may not be strong enough to push the unemployment rate down very much,” Mr. Brown said.

Mr. Wood said American economic data like Thursday’s claims numbers were “not bad, but not great.”

“Jobless rate leads to consumer confidence, which leads to consumer spending,” Mr. Wood said. “The key is consumption. The employment situation is the basis for consumer sentiment and behavior. And we’re seeing stabilization and a modest improvement in that.”

Mr. Wood acknowledged that risks from the oil spill and the European debt crisis could still affect the United States’ growth, which the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, indicated would be 3.5 percent this year as long as the markets held.

Mr. Fitzpatrick said the news from China was more significant than the increase in jobless claims. “But to say they’re going to carry the entire world out of a recession is out of the question if their customers around the world are mired in a recession,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said.

In Europe, the Euro Stoxx 50 index, a barometer of euro zone blue chips, settled 2 percent higher, while the FTSE 100 index added 0.92 percent in London.

David Jolly contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 12, 2010

An article on Friday about the stock markets’ performance on Thursday misstated, in some editions, part of the name of the company for which the market strategist Stephen P. Wood works. It is Russell Investments, not Russell Investors. The article also misspelled Mr. Wood’s surname as “Woods” in one reference.

Reference Link
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/business/11markets.html?nl=&emc=aua21

Courtesy
The New York Times Company

U.S. heart attack rates declining: study

(Reuters) – Heart attack rates fell 24 percent in California between 2000 and 2008, probably because of better care, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.

The study, in the New England Journal of Medicine, is the first large survey since the adoption of new treatments and medicines for preventing heart attacks. It examined more than 46,000 heart attack hospitalizations.

The decline, which reflects similar trends across the United States, follows bans on smoking in public places. Also, doctors have become better at treating high blood pressure and cholesterol.

Dr. Robert Yeh of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston and colleagues said the 24 percent drop was seen even though doctors can better detect heart attacks and despite the growing rates of diabetes and obesity, both of which raise the risk of heart attack.

“We would expect an increase in heart attacks because we’re picking up more heart attacks than we used to,” Yeh said in a telephone interview. “We found that, despite that, they are still going down.”

The team used data from the 3 million people in the Kaiser Permanente Northern California health system, the largest medical group in the United States, which paid for part of the study.

The heart attack rate peaked in 1999, dropping by nearly one-quarter through 2008. The rate of deaths in the month after a heart attack also declined by 24 percent between 1999 and 2008.

The most dramatic decrease — 62 percent since 2000 — came among people suffering from the most damaging type of heart attack, measured as an elevation in the ST segment of the wave that appears on a heart monitor. Such attacks should be rapidly treated with clot-busting drugs or tube-like stents that keep arteries open.

‘CONSISTENT TREND’

Non-ST segment heart attacks, which are not considered to be as dangerous because they involve a smaller portion of the heart wall, peaked in 2004 and have been declining since. They are often treated with drugs.

“Despite our ability to more easily diagnose heart attacks using sensitive biomarkers, we found a consistent trend of fewer severe ST-elevation myocardial infarctions over the past decade, the type of heart attack we particularly want to prevent,” Dr. Alan Go, of Kaiser, who led the study, said in a statement.

Yeh and his colleagues said other population studies, such as those done in Minnesota and Massachusetts, have also suggested that heart attacks are declining.

“But published literature from these studies is limited to data collected before 2002 — before many current strategies for the prevention and management of cardiovascular disease were implemented more widely in the community,” the researchers wrote.

Other research has shown that overall deaths from heart disease have declined by 22 percent in men and 23 percent in women since 2000, according to a commentary in the journal by Jeremiah Brown and Gerald O’Connor of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice in New Hampshire.

But the risk is twice as high for Americans in Oklahoma, the lower Mississippi corridor and Appalachia, possibly because of socioeconomic factors, they said.

“The rate of improvement has slowed down or stopped,” they added.

Reference Link
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6586DL20100610?feedType=nl&feedName=ushealth1100

Courtesy
Thomson Reuters