Dow sets record as inflation eases
NEW YORK, Nov. 16 (UPI) -- Word that October's consumer price index was weaker than expected Thursday sent blue chips into record territory.
The Dow Jones industrial average was up 54.11 or 0.44 percent to 10,305.82 on a volume of 2.87 billion shares, its first close higher than 12,300. The Nasdaq composite gained 6.31 or 0.26 percent to 2,449.06 and the Standard & Poor's 500 rose 3.19 or 0.23 percent to 1,399.76.
The Labor Department said last month's CPI fell 0.5 percent and the core CPI, which exludes food and energy costs, rose a mere 0.1 percent. Both figures were less than expected.
The benchmark 10-year Treasury note lost 7/32, lifting its yield 4.65 percent.
The dollar rose to 118.2 yen from 118.04 as the euro slipped to $1.2797 from $1.2826.
Tokyo's Nikkei 225 closed at 16,163.87 on a loss of 79.60 or 0.49 percent, and London's FTSE 100 settled up 25.10 or 0.40 percent at 6,254.90.
TNT NV sells logistics unit to French
ROTTERDAM, Netherlands, Nov. 16 (UPI) -- TNT NV, the Dutch mail and express group, will sell its freight management business to France's Geodis SA for $589.3 million.
The deal with the French logistics company lets TNT complete its departure from the logistics business, where smaller profits have hindered the growth of its express and mail operations, the Financial Times said Thursday.
"As part of our focus on networks strategy we studied the relationship to our express and mail delivery networks and decided that selling the freight management business is the best way forward and will allow TNT to focus on the many growth opportunities that our network businesses offer," said Peter Bakker, chief executive of TNT.
Citigroup wins bidding for Chinese bank
GUANGZHOU, China, Nov. 16 (UPI) -- A consortium led by Citigroup Inc. was named Thursday as preferred bidder for Guangdong Development Bank, a struggling lender in southern China.
The Citigroup consortium agreed to pay $3.1 billion for 85.59 percent of GDB, which runs 501 branches across China, the Financial Times reported Thursday.
The big New York bank will 20 percent of GDB and its partners will hold remaining shares: IBM with 4.74 percent; State Grid, a Chinese utility, and China Life, the mainland's biggest insurer, each with 20 percent; Citic Trust with 12.85 percent; and Puhua Investment with 8 percent.
Although Citigroup only holds a 20-percent stake in GDB, it is expected to assume operational control.
Thursday's announcement marks a defeat for Societe Generale, the French bank, and its partners, which include Baosteel and Sinopec. Ping An, a local insurance company, had also sought to win GDB.
Milton Friedman, economist, dead at 94
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 16 (UPI) -- Milton Friedman, a Nobel laureate and one of the most influential economists of the 20th century, died Thursday in California at the age of 94.
Friedman died of heart failure after being taken to a hospital near his home in San Francisco. His wife, Rose Friedman, survives him.
Awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976 for his scholarship underlining the importance of money in determining economic health, Friedman championed the vitality of the individual over what he saw as the suffocating tendencies of the state.
His work was often seen as the definitive foil to the views of John Maynard Keynes, the British socialist whose economic theories influenced New Deal theoreticians of the Franklin Roosevelt administration and Europe's Social Democrats.
Friedman's ideas hugely influenced the governments of U.S. President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s and numerous Third World governments in the 1990s.
"Historical evidence speaks with a single voice on the relation between political freedom and a free market," Friedman wrote in his 1962 book, "Capitalism and Freedom."
"I know of no example in time or place of a society that has been marked by a large measure of political freedom and that has not also used something comparable to a free market to organize the bulk of economic activity."
