This may be the week when US Federal Reserve chairman Mr Alan Greenspan finally admits that some exuberance has returned to the US economy, which has been in recession since May of last year.
The Dow Jones industrial index yesterday surged to its second-highest one-day gain this year, climbing by more than 200 points in afternoon trading, and the Nasdaq rose in excess of 50 points on upbeat technology forecasts - especially from Intel and wireless technology firm Qualcomm - with Cisco, Sun, Oracle and Xilinx all gaining ground.
Intel was the stock of the day, surging 4 per cent after the chip maker unveiled powerful new Xeon server processors that it says can boost performance by up to 80 percent over current Intel-based systems.
Intel CEO Mr Craig Barrett said that Moore's Law (the observation first made by Intel co-founder Mr Gordon Moore that semiconductor density doubles roughly every 18 months) and the Internet "are not only alive and well, but are the driving forces behind fundamental economic growth".
Sales of existing homes soared by a record 16.2 percent in January to an unprecedented pace of 6.04 million units, helped by a combination of mild weather and rebounding consumer confidence in the housing market, according to the National Association of Realtors.
January's rise in sales was the largest on record, surpassing a 13 percent boost seen in May 1995 and far outpacing analysts expectations. The record home sales underlined growing expectations that the US will edge ahead of Europe in growth this year, a factor in a rise of the US dollar against the euro in trading yesterday. The US currency also climbed against the pound, the Swiss franc and the Canadian dollar.
Tomorrow Mr Greenspan may give the dollar a further boost in testimony before a House Financial Services Committee in the US Congress, when he is expected to acknowledge that the conditions are in place for a recovery to occur.
Intel's Xeon is the first chip to use "hyper-threading" technology, which allows a single processor to be seen as two processors by the operating system or software, and its "Netburst" micro-architecture, the first new Intel micro-architecture in the server space since 1995.
