Asian Equity Market News: Shares were seen retreating on Wednesday post the difficult session on Wall Street. However, Tokyo ended higher, gaining over 2%. This was seen after government mentioned that it would double disaster reserves by ~$7 billion.
Talking about Asian equity market news, Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 continues to hover around its 34-year high, with the index gaining 2.01% to reach ~34,476.86 levels. This was supported by strong buying of chipmakers.
Apart from this, there are speculations that Bank of Japan might not opt to change ultra-lax monetary policy as soon as this was expected by global analysts. This was seen after wages declined for 20th straight month in November. Was this momentum in Asian equity market seen in our Asian counterparts too?
Well, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng saw the decline of ~0.4% to end at ~16,122.67 levels, with Shanghai Composite index losing ~0.2% to reach ~2,887.18 levels. South Korea’s Kospi saw a fall of ~0.7% to 2,542.53 levels. This was seen after country’s unemployment rate was highest since the month of January 2022, as per Statistics Korea. S&P/ASX 200 in Australia declined by ~0.7% to 7,469.20 levels. Recent data points have exhibited that Australian consumer price inflation, or CPI, saw a drop to nearly 2-year low which was ~4.3% in November. This was accompanied by significant slowdown in core inflation. On the positive side, this data has indeed raised the expectations regarding the policy easing measures.
While Asian equity market news continued to revolve around the above-mentioned data points, until when uncertainties regarding global outlook will continue to haunt investors? Well, only time will tell! What we know as of now is that the US Fed already increased main interest rate to highest level since the year 2001. This was done in the hopes to grind down overall economy along with investment prices to bring inflation under its control. Given that inflation is somewhat down from peak, the US Fed earlier indicated that it might reduce its key rates 3 times throughout the course of 2024.
On Friday, big and leading organisations in S&P 500 are expected to start reporting their results for final 3 months of 2023. Broad expectations are that the companies should report modest growth in EPS on year-over-year basis. Earnings data and outlook commentaries should also give some picture about the rate cuts in 2024.
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