Two countries produced big news last week. First, the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street (the Bank of England) slashed interest rates by half to 0.25% —the lowest rate in the 322-year bank history. The chief economist there said in July he would “rather run the risk of taking a sledge hammer to crack a nut than taking a miniature rock hammer to tunnel out of prison.†So the move was expected by the market.
It was accompanied by a quantitative easing move that was not as well signaled earlier: called the term funding scheme it amounts to £100 bn to buy bonds. Sterling and the London stock exchange rose.
Then good US employment figures came out, showing 255,000 new jobs created in July, much higher than the 180,000 forecast by economists. The US unemployment rate is now 4.9% according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The odds of another Fed rate rise have increased because of good performance of our economy on the job front, and one result was that gold fell and financial stocks rose.
From Neue Zuercher Zeitung, a progress report on the search for a vaccination against Zika virus: The US NIH has begun testing a vaccine in healthy humans after animal tests in rhesus monkeys of a triple virus protection jab against the Brazilian version of Zika.
This result was published on the home page of Science, a weekly publication which pointed out the need for a vaccination to prevent maternal Zika infection from leading to births of babies with brain damage. The experiments reported were by Dan Barouch at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
They used vaccines tested first on mice which produced total protection. Then they used 2 of the 3 vaccines on 16 rhesus monkeys (different pairs in each case) and then exposed them and the control group of another 16 rhesus monkeys to the virus. The monkeys which got the two vaccines did not get infected, but one of the control monkeys was infected. An autopsy found Zika virus not just in this poor monkey’s blood but also in its cerebo-spinal fluid and in other cells.
Meanwhile the other inoculated 16 monkeys’ blood showed the presence of antibodies against Zika. The 3 vaccines tested in combinations of 2 per monkey were the classics: inactivated full-length prM-env from the plasmid ring of the Zika DNA; transfer of purified lgG from vaccinated mice; and implantation of “Trojan horse†bits of Zika DNA (CD4 and CD8) to be transmitted by a harmless virus host.
