Asian stocks open mixed as market assess market tensions

Economies.com
2019-05-21 03:51AM UTC

Asian stocks opened the second session of the week on mixed performance, with the Japanese stock indices falling, and the Australian, New Zealand stocks slightly falling, while the Chinese stock indices rose by about 1%, to the South Korea's Kospi and Hong Kong Hang Seng Indices which rose on Tuesday.

 

This comes after the Commerce Department announced a grace period of 90 days before imposing the sanctions on Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and its affiliates, reflecting the possibility of a breakthrough in the trade war between Washington and Beijing, after US President, Donald Trump, signed an executive order last Wednesday that required putting Huawei and its affiliates on a trading blacklist "Entity List", in a move that bans the telecom giant from buying parts and components from U.S. companies without U.S. government approval. Which was later followed by the suspension of business between Alphabet Inc’s Google and Huawei.

 

China announced earlier this week its intention to increase tariffs on imports of US goods estimated at $60 billion from 10% to 25% by the beginning of June, which shows the escalation of the trade war between China and the United States, which have increased tariffs on imports of Chinese goods estimated at $200 billion also from 10% to 25%. Amid a threat by the US President' administration to impose 25% customs duties on other Chinese goods estimated at $300 billion soon.

 

On the other hand, We have followed the release of the minute statement of the Australian Central Bank meeting held on May 7th, in which the monetary policy makers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Australia agreed to set interest rates at 1.50%, contrary to expectations at that time. The statement dropped a repeated sentence that "there was no strong reason to adjust interest rates in the short term", which reinforces the possibility of an upcoming cut of interest rates on federal funds.

 

In terms of trading, the Japanese stock indices fell during today's trading session, with Topix index falling by 0.55% to lose 8.57 points, down to the level of 1,546.35, while Nikkei 225 also fell by 0.39%, losing 83.11 points, down to 21,218.62 level.

 

On the other hand, China's CSI 300 rose 1.96% (70.99 points) to reach 3,688.78. With the Shanghai Composite Index also rising 1.66% (47.62 points) to reach the level of 2,918.22.

 

Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index rose 0.44% (122.39 points) to 27,910.00, while South Korea's Kospi rose 0.85% (17.51 points) up to 2,073.22.

 

To the NZX 50 index of New Zealand stocks, which fell by 0.08 (8.59 points) to reach 10,225.56. While the S&P/ASX 200 index of Australian stocks also fell by 0.05% (3.40 points) to 6,472.70.

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