TOKYO/HONG KONG/SHANGHAI/SYDNEY (dpa-AFX) – The most important stock markets in the Far East continued to fall on Wednesday. Only the Japanese stock market bucked the trend and picked up.
In view of the gains in Japan, Deutsche Bank’s market strategists referred to minutes of the central bank meeting in April. After that, the majority of monetary watchdogs voted in favor of continuing the extremely loose monetary policy monetary policy pronounced. The meeting was the first under new central bank governor Ueda Kazuo. The leading index Nikkei 225 rose by 0.56 percent to 33,575.14 points.
The shares of the export-oriented Japanese economy also benefited from the weakness of the national currency. “The yen is by far the weakest G10 currency this year,” emphasized Ulrich Stephan, chief investment strategist for private and corporate customers at Deutsche Bank. “After the Bank of Japan failed to signal any timely change in monetary policy last week, positions that had been betting on an appreciation of the yen were liquidated on a large scale in the currency options markets.”
Things looked worse on the Chinese markets. Here stopped the disappointment of the youngest rate cut which was not as strong as hoped. The mood on the markets therefore remained subdued in view of the overcast economic situation in China. The CSI 300 index (CSI 300) with the 300 most important stocks on the Shenzhen and Shanghai stock exchanges recently lost one percent to 3885.04 points. The Hang Seng Index (Hang Seng) of the Chinese special administrative region of Hong Kong recently fell by 1.89 percent to 19,237.09 points.
Market strategist Stephen Innes of asset manager SPI Asset Management expressed hope that China could soon take further steps to stimulate the economy. This could trigger a short-term rally. However, the measures should not be as extensive as one is used to from before. This in turn could raise doubts about the extent to which China is still able to support the domestic economy.
In Australia, too, things went down after the gains of the previous days. The S&P ASX 200 lost 0.58 percent to 7314.90 points. Market analyst Tina Teng from broker CMC Markets referred to declining commodity prices, which are affecting the commodity-heavy Australian stock market./mf/tih