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Rate hawks are becoming an endangered species on both sides of the Atlantic. City analysts, who a few months ago were confidently predicting that borrowing costs could rise as high as 7.5%, are now hastily backtracking.
A raft of weak data appears to have convinced even the most paranoid analysts that inflation is not likely to threaten the government's 2.5% target anytime soon. This week's figures - the first rise in unemployment for nearly two years and the lowest service sector inflation for 2 years - only confirm the trend.
This morning's quarterly inflation forecast from the Bank of England is expected to confirm the newly fashionable view. A below target forecast today should help persuade the last remaining doubters that after keeping rates on hold at 6% since February, the next move by the Bank's monetary policy committee will be to cut rates.
Meanwhile, most US fund managers believe Alan Greenspan has guided the mighty American economy to a soft landing and that his next move will be to cut borrowing costs. The Federal Reserve was still warning about inflation risks when it announced its decision to keep rates on hold last night, but some analysts believe rates could be cut by Christmas. Successful soft landings are rare achievements. If the Fed and the Bank of England have simultaneously engineered one, the coincidence is even rarer.
The risk now could be on the down side. Some economists warn that the trebling of oil prices since the start of 1999 will inevitably lead to a collapse in growth in the industrialised world. For all the hype about the arrival of weightless economies, generating wealth from computer code and ideas, Britain and America are still powered by oil.
Out of the blue
Glaxo Wellcome slipped out a statement yesterday, saying it had won approval from America's Food and Drug Administration for Trizivir, a triple combination tablet for treating HIV.
The news had been expected. Like other potions pitched against life-threatening diseases, Trizivir has enjoyed "accelerated approval" status from drug regulators. The European Union, for example, should give the thumbs up by early next year. So there was no detectable City reaction to the news. The shares failed to fly. Financial followers are still just sitting around waiting for the Glaxo/SmithKline merger to solidify (or dissolve).
Yet Trizivir marks another milestone in the extraordinarily successful challenge to Aids funded by the world's major pharmaceutical firms as they chased therapies for what initially looked like a disease of the developed world, centred in the world's richest market for drugs.
The drug companies cracked how to suppress the virus some years ago now, but the resultant cocktails had sufferers popping up to 30 tablets a day, all carefully or confusingly timed to be with or without food, water or whatever. Trizivir, on the other hand, is a straight twice-a-day pill, with no food or water restrictions. At $26-a-day, it will prolong many lives, and it should be in US pharmacies by December.
Of course the developing world will have to await a while longer. For all the years of talking about so-called preferential pricing, aimed at helping the nations of Africa in particular to fight Aids, it seems that the first country under the programme - Senegal - was only signed up two weeks ago by Merck, Glaxo, Boehringer and Bristol Myers Squibb.
Compared with its neighbours, the country is said to be well advanced in terms of logistics and economic-cum-political will, but agreement still took seven months of negotiation.
Which is where we might drag in Gordon Brown, in the wake of last week's pre-Budget address, when he said he wanted an urgent review of how incentives, such as tax breaks, might speed vaccines for the world's killer diseases.
Yet the chancellor's statement seems to have come completely out of the blue to the big drug firms. No doubt they would be quite happy to pocket subsidies from the British government to ship their products to the sub-Sahara, but it seems strange that there was no consultation in advance.
Right stock
It is surprising that Bank of Scotland appears so determined that it should not be run by Ian Harley, the chief executive of Abbey, given that Mr Harley appears to possess one of the main characteristics necessary for admission to the BoS board: Scottishness.
Every member of the BoS board, which contains the usual sprinkling of Sirs and Lords, was born in Scotland. So was Mr Harley, in Falkirk to be precise.
In an attempt to show its diversity, BoS pointed out yesterday that three members of its board do at least work outside Scotland, as far afield as England, no less. Clearly, a demonstration of its ambition to be "nationwide".
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