with a bang. will the economy do the same? what the all-important jobs report says and what it means. >> cancer will fall to the acts of science. >> the fight against a deadly disease from a man on the front lines, the ceo of the presti prestigious cancer center and how it may become a manageable disease. goldie hawn, a funny lady who takes her life very seriously. the "wall street journal report." now, maria bartiromo. >> maria will be here with the

rest of the program in just a moment, but first here's a look at what's making news as we head into a new week on wall street. the unemployment rate fell to its lowest level in nearly three years in december. the economy added 200,000 fresh jobs and the unemployment rate ticked down to 8.5%, both numbers better than the economy had expected, and that's better in three months in which the economy generated 100,000 or more jobs each month. the markets kicked off the new year with a bang. the dow 180 points on tuesday in a holiday shortened week. the averages were flat midweek and fell on friday. u.s. auto sales keep on accelerating. for the month of december, gm was up 4%, ford up 10%, and toyota climbed about a half percent. automakers sold about 27 million cars for all of 2011. that was the best year since

2007. yahoo will soon have a new ceo. the company has been without a leader since it fired carol barts in early september. kyle thompson will be the new ceo. he will be the fourth ceo in fooi years f five years for the struggling internet company. preparing now for possible bankruptcy if it can't sell enough of its patents to stay afloat. the company would operate normally during bankruptcy proceedings. they may be d-listed from the new york stock exchange. what do the jobs numbers tell us about where the economy and the markets are likely to go this year? joining me now, diane swonk, chief economist at mezerau financial. happy new year. >> happy new year to you. >> unemployment rate down to 8.5%, best number in about three years.

but nitpick this number for me. was it as good as it looks like on the surface? >> i wish i could say it was. the trend is in the right direction, but what's interesting, we got some jobs in construction that were really largely due to the fact that it's been 60 degrees here in chicago. not usual for december weather. that unseasonably mild winter weather really disturbs construction figures. we also saw a big gain on retail. a lot of people thought it was on-line sales, but we saw corporate america loosen its coffers a bit and spend in the holiday season. they did their holiday parties again, they used hotels for their holiday parties, they stepped up their entertainment, but that was corporations, not consumers. the one positive thing is we're seeing anecdotally, it looks like new business formation is picking up. small businesses -- new small businesses starting to hire and become a part of that corporate sort of spillover effect. that would be very good going

forward, but we have to face it, there are headwinds. >> let's talk a little bit about your overall outlook for 2012 and how positively you see the economy. and as part of that, address the question of whether this year, 2012, is going to be the year where the u.s. economy decouples from what's going on in europe. and tell me, please, when can i stop watching the latest italian greek bond auction? >> not any time soon. i'm really sorry about that. the problem is we learned in 2008 that we're in a global economy and, you know, we all go down together. the only way to get out of it is to start bailing in the boat together so the ship doesn't go down, and that's the reality we live in. decoupling is a myth. we are going to see the economy reaccelerate from 2011. that doesn't say much in 2012. we get the quarter, 2.5% growth after the end of the year, we recoup some losses from japan

and all that. it's still not enough. we should be growing multiples of 2, 2 and a quarter percent, then all this political issue we face wouldn't matter. the political risk in europe, the political risk in the middle east, high internet prices because of instability there. we should see energy prices lower, yet they're not. these are the things that are headwinds for 2012, so we still have a very uneven recovery. the good news is it looks like labor markets are healing a little more fundamentally, and like you said, we have to take it where we can get it. >> let's talk a little from your economic perch about what you foresee from the markets this year and how might individuals be positioning themselves for 2012? >> i'm not an investment adviser, but from a pure economic basis, what you really have to take home from the lessons of 2011 was we had a growth recession the first half of the year. we had slowing growth and rising unemployment and then the economy reaccelerated at the end of the year as it recouped those

losses. even with that growth, and we're expecting a stronger growth in 2012, we were able to get blood from a turnip in profits. cash on corporate balance sheets has grown to well over $2 trillion, and the fed is working very hard to unlock that cash and get it re did deployed in t economy. that looks like it's feeding into some new business formation as well. that's the good news, and i think that's where the positive thing for markets are, but let's face it, you've got to have a good stomach for anything to go to in 2012 because all the political risks are just as much there in 2012 as they were in 2011, if not worse. >> diane, a lot of bumps in the road ahead and that road basically here in this country, i think, leads to november and the elections. diane, thank you very much. >> thank you, tyler. up next on the "wall street journal report," is an end to cancer in our near future?

the leading doctor who says that science is coming closer to a cure than ever before. and later, maria talks to academy award-winning actress goldie hawn about her movie career and the work that is keeping her busy today, far away from film sets. a range of coverages to choose from. who is she? that's flobot. she's this new robot we're trying out, mostly for, like, small stuff. wow! look at her go! she's pretty good. she's pretty good. hey, flobot, great job. oops. [ powers down ] uh-oh, flobot is broken. the "name your price" tool, only from progressive. call or click today.

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dying. where are we in the fight against cancer? by combining cutting edge research with entrepreneurial zeal, my next guest hopes to change the way we're fighting the disease. dr. ronald dipino is the president of the university of texas md anderson cancer center, one of the largest in the united states. doctor, it's a pleasure to have you on the program. >> thank you, maria. >> let's talk about that, because i feel like -- someone told me recently there are 200 drugs in the pipeline right now for cancer. going from, you know, in the pipeline, and i know there are several stages there, to actually finding a cure, how

would characterize where we are in this fight? >> i would say this is an extraordinary period in the history of science. we've done pretty well at understanding and moving towards improved management of cancer. there have been successes to clients and death rates in the past several years, but we've reached a point now where we have an opportunity to make a decisive assault on the problem, and that's because there is a confluence of truly transform active technologies to understand cancer at a very, very deep level and transform that information into drugs and informational drugs that are very effective. to give you one example, in the area of sequencing, we can do hours for a few thousand dollars what it took $3.6 billion and a decade in the 1990s. so we have reached a very true

inflexion point in our ability to understand the basis of the disease and do something about it. >> when do you think we'll find a cure? >> i think it's hard to predict exactly when we will get there, but there's no question in my mind that cancer will fall to the ax of science. whether it will take one decade, two or three, it's very similar to what happened in the mid-'60s. we had a line of sight to the moon, and jfk said, we're going to the moon. we did not yet have all the knowledge or all the technology. we had mercury, gemini, appollo and that increase in knowledge in technology. but what was special about that moment is that we knew that it was possible. and there is that same feeling right now in the history of medicine where we have that depth of knowledge and the technology to really do something about this dreaded disease. >> that is so extraordinary. thank you for telling us that.

we've got so many important things coming together. i know technology has changed things enormously. we're looking at robotics doing prostate cancer surgery. it's extraordinary. but also you've got demographics really changing the story. so md anderson boasts a large cancer prevention program. let's talk about prevention for a moment, everything from lifestyle to genetic causes. what is possible now in terms of prevention and how has the fact that we're living longer, the demographic changes, impacted things? >> first about the demographics just to alert your viewership as to what is going on in the world today. over the last 60 or 70 years, we've essentially doubled life expectancy due to advances in medicine, hygiene, vaccines and so on. the average life span has increased from 42 to 74. by the year 2025, we will have 1.2 billion individuals over the

age of 60. after the age of 60, the incidents of the great four diseases, cancer, alzheimer's, diabetes and heart disease, doubles every five years. by the time you're 85, you have a 45% chance of having alzheimer's. >> wow. >> today those diseases extract $1 trillion from the economy of the united states alone. so we have an extraordinary crisis that the world is careening towards. as the baby boomers, as the life expectancy worldwide careens toward the 60-plus transition. so the only solution at this point is science. we talked about bending the health care curve, but it's about understanding the diseases so we can prevent them, or if they happen to cure them decisively. >> where is the innovation? recently i was told that the neuroscience part of things,

looking at alzheimer's, looking at autism, we don't know as much about the brain as we do other parts of the body. where is the money moving in terms of investment right now in medicine? >> i would say that, in fact, neuroscience has been one that's been under very significant pressure. just a few days ago, they eliminated their neuroscience program prior to the gfk. why? because they don't know enough. the field has been limited to relative hypotheses. there hasn't been that depth of analysis needed to truly understand what the molecular underpinnings are of this disease. >> has the money shifted towards cancer? >> the money has shifted towards cancer. i believe going forward, it will go towards all these age-related disease. cancer is way ahead because the technologies that can now be brought to bear on understanding

cancer is critically important. but it's also very important to emphasize that at that pre-clinical space, we've got to invent new organizational constructs in order to systemically drive discoveries, two points of visibility that the private sector can then take down the field. at md anderson, what we're doing is using my entrepreneurial background and what's going on in the field at large to organize ourselves differently so that we can generate an expressway of activities that allows us very definitively to do the experiments needed to get that line of sight. >> that is wonderful. well, we are wishing you a lot of luck with this and wonderful success. good to have you on the program. >> thank you, maria. >> thank you so much. dr. ronald dipinot joining us. actress goldie hawn is known for films such as "private

benjamin." is she playing a new act away from hollywood? >> it's going to be a big revolution in how we deal with

forty years ago, he wasn't looking for financial advice. back then he had something more important to do. he wasn't focused on his future. but fortunately, somebody else was. at usaa we provide retirement planning for our military, veterans and their families. now more than ever, it's important to get financial advice from people who share your military values. for our free usaa retirement guide, call 877-242-usaa. academy award-winning actress goldie hawn has found the role of a lifetime linking the brains and hearts of kids. her non-profit organization has

linked educators, scientists with literacy. do happy kids learn better and what can we learn from them? goldie, thanks for being here. >> thank you. >> you've had such a diverse career as an actress. how did you find education advocacy? tell me how you got into this. >> actually, i got into it just because of a love for children. it really has to do with that sort of thing in my life which has been children's charities and taking care of kids and loving my own and so on and so forth, and i just couldn't bear the fact that i was looking at kids going into classrooms, opening up fire, killing people. i started seeing things and symptoms in our society that were very, very painful. and instead of giving to certain things, i figured, what can i do to bring happiness, more joy, more stability to children? and that's how this was created, through giving children some tools, if you will, to understand that, yes, they can choose happiness.

yes, they can manage their emotions. yes, they are in the driver's seat. >> also there's all this noise. you know, on computers, on line, information coming at them, so you have written a lot about ten mindful minutes. tell me about the book. you say if a parent or an educator just has ten minutes with a child to focus on mindfulness, this is a game changer. >> if you do that each day, what happens with the brain, because what we do in the program is we teach children about their brains, and they learn that when they get quiet and they focus and they breathe and relax, which we do three times a day in the classroom, that it actually changes their neurobiology, and the brain actually gets attuned to that. so my book was written for caregiveres, parents and teachers because they want to know how they can manage their child better. the book is how do we manage our lives better in order to attune

to our lives, our inner world, we won't be able to attune to our children. your book is published by scholastic. tell us about your hopes for outcomes. >> outcomes are for children to actually create a sense of emotional stability. also for them to be able to get through school in a way to have a more optimistic experience. to be able to know when they're stressed, to self-recognize because that will ultimately help their health care throughout their lifetime. also it will help reduce anger. i think leaders and building new leadership with these kind of tools is vitally important, so if i were to look at my dream, my outcome, is that we would be socially and emotionally an intelligent nation with leaders that actually can get along. >> what have you learned in terms of negotiating the demands of running a non-profit? you must be dealing with a whole

different set of, you know, constituents and groups from, you know, as opposed to your acting career. >> well, basically, it's business building. you know, a foundation and you go out and do the best thing that you can do for children or for parents or for caregivers moving into hospital settings now, it's a big business. it's a lot to run. it can be overwhelming sometimes, particularly -- this book "ten mindful minutes" went to the best-seller list. i was shocked. everybody wants to sort of know how we can slow down, how we can manage ourselves, how we can not be so angry. and the book just kind of did this. the same with the curriculum. now we're looking at teachers saying, this is what we need to do. this is how we need to manage our kids. with on us as an organization, it is like trying to juggle eight different things. a huge shift.

this is so important, goldie, and i'm so happy that you wrote this book. let me shift gears for a minute. years ago you once told me you attribute your successful career on the fact that you focus on what you want to focus on. i don't have to do a movie every year. i'm going to do what i want to do and live my life the way i want. it's been a few years since you made a film. do you miss it? what are you looking at now? >> do i miss filmmaking? i have to tell you the truth. no. one of the reasons, i've been doing it for a long time, and i always thought when you get to a certain age, we should change what we do. what are our passions, right? that's what happened here. these are ten years of the most j joyful, incredible, stimulating times of my life, but i am going back to work. i am actually doing a pilot for hbo, and that pilot is called "the viagra diaries," and it's a limited series we're doing.

i've taken a right-hand turn, or left, however you want to look at it, and i'm going back, you know, into what i have done. >> and you also -- i know that you were approached to do broadway as well, right? >> yes. yeah, numerous times. >> is that in the cards? >> it could be. >> at some point, maybe. >> i'm trained as a singer and dancer, and it's crazy i didn't really use that in my career. but i have to tell you, working with children and working with these foundation and see where we are today and the need that is so great. because we're in the u.k. now, we're in canada and we're in the u.s. and we just moved to australia. it's going to be a big revolution in on you we deal with our children. i love what i'm doing. >> thå?e book is terrific. thanks for joining us, goldie. >> thanks. >> good to see you. goldie hawn. up next on the "wall street journal report," a look on the news this week that will have an impact on your money. as we go to a break, a look at how the stock market ended the week. i'd race down that hill without a helmet.

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here are the stories coming up that may move the markets and impact your money this week. earning season kicks off, and we'll hear first, as we so often

do, from alcoa. wednesday the beige book gives a glimpse of regional economy across the united states. thursday, total retail sales figures for the month of december are out. they will be very closely watched. friday we'll find out if the u.s. is importing or exporting more goods when we hear about the balance of trade. that's the program for today. thanks so much for joining us. maria will be back next week. her guest, the man who manages nearly a half trillion dollars in one of the world's largest retirement companies, tia tiaa krep