Asian stock markets struggle to rise, dollar slips
TOKYO: Asian shares stepped back from more than two-year highs on Tuesday while the dollar extended losses as passage of a US healthcare bill grew doubtful, and as investors bet the Federal Reserve will be more cautious about raising interest rates.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan fluttered between positive and negative territory and last was slightly higher. But it remained well shy of its loftiest levels since April 2015, scaled in the previous session.
Republican Senators Jerry Moran and Mike Lee announced their opposition on Monday to US legislation to dismantle and replace the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, leaving it without enough votes to pass.
US S&P stock futures edged down slightly after the news, and were last off 0.1 per cent.
In Europe, futures for the Eurostoxx 50 and the DAX were both down 0.4 per cent, while the FTSE was 0.3 per cent lower.
Wall Street ended little changed on Monday in low-volume trading, as investors braced for a flood of secondquarter earnings reports later this week.
Overall Asian sentiment remained underpinned by solid China data on Monday, which showed its economy expanded at a faster-than-expected 6.9 per cent clip in the second quarter, setting the country on course to comfortably meet its 2017 growth target.
Chinese shares on Tuesday faced profit-taking as well a sell-off in smallcaps. Both both the blue chip CSI300 index and the Shanghai Composite Index were down in the morning, then turned marginally up.
“At the end of this month, corporate China has to pay their tax bill, so you have people taking money off the table and liquidating,” said Gavin Parry, managing director at Parry International Trading Limited in Hong Kong.
The dollar, already down in early trade, extended losses. It slipped 0.5 per cent on the day to 112.14 yen, well below its nearly four-month high of 114.495 touched last week.
The euro jumped 0.4 per cent to $1.1522, after earlier pushing to its highest since May 2016.
The Australian dollar surged 1.5 per cent to two-year highs after minutes of the last meeting of the country’s central bank showed policymakers turned more upbeat on the economic outlook.
The dollar index, which tracks the greenback against a basket of six major rivals, wallowed at 94.791, down 0.2 per cent after plumbing its lowest levels since September 2016.
“It’s hard to be bullish on the dollar, both from the monetary side and from the US politics side,” said Masafumi Yamamoto, chief currency strategist at Mizuho Securities.
Fading support for US President Donald Trump was weighing on the dollar, he said, as the US administration struggled to gather enough backers in the Senate to pass the healthcare reform bill, raising doubts about how the rest of its ambitious agenda would fare.
Japan’s Nikkei stock index dropped 0.6 per cent to end the day a hair below the key 20,000 level, as markets resumed trading after a public holiday on Monday and caught up to the resurgent yen.
Fading US rate hike bets also weighed on the dollar. Fed funds futures continue to show less than a 50 per cent chance of a rate hike in December after Fed Chair Janet Yellen sounded a cautious tone last week in congressional testimony, and following downbeat US retail sales data on Friday.
“US data is still not strong,” said Harumi Taguchi, principal economist at IHS Markit in Tokyo. The combination of that data and the political situation has pressured US Treasury yields, which inflation and undermines the dollar, she said.
The US 10-year yield stood at 2.303 per cent in Asian trading, down from its US close on Monday of 2.309 per cent.
The weaker dollar lifted spot gold which rose 0.3 per cent to $1,237.50 per ounce.