Wsj Review

The WSJ review May 04 – May 10, 2015

Macro

* US trade gap increased to $51.37 billion in Q1 2015, which led the economists at J.P. Morgan Chase and Deutsche Bank to lower the estimates for the Q1 GDP.

* US unemployment rate decreased to 5.4% in April, which led the Dow Industrials climbed 1.5% to 18,191.11 on 5/8/15.

* The Gasoline priced rose 31% since January 2015 when the crude oil price was at the 6-year low point.

Micro

* The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned that there were outbreaks in hepatitis C infections and HIV because of the injection-drug abuse and CDC called in April for all the local health departments to take action to prevent the further outbreaks.

* GlaxoSmithKline PLC invested $20 million to work with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to search for a cure for HIV/AIDS.

* J.P. Morgan predicted that Vertex Pharmaceutical Inc would be able to earn $1.6 billion in 2016 from the new cystic-fibrosis drug if approved by FDA.

* Alexion Pharmaceuticals paid $8.4 billion to purchase Synageva BioPharma Corp which did not have any product on the market but had a late-stage development of a treatment for a rare disease.

* Amarin Corp. suit FDA on 5/7/15 because the FDA prohibition on off-label promotion violated the company’s First Amendment rights to distribute information about the unapproved information to public.

* The maker of M&M’s and Snickers, Mars Inc., supported the proposal of including guidelines for customers to control the added sugar to 10% of daily calories.