Shares rise

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SINGAPORE/NEW YORK- Asia shares rose on Thursday, helped by a jump in their Chinese counterparts on Beijing’s latest measures to shore up its crumbling stock market, while elsewhere, investors continued to have their eyes on US President Donald Trump’s policy plans.

China on Thursday announced a plan to guide hundreds of billions of yuan of new capital from state-owned insurers into stocks each year, in a sign of Beijing’s concern about sagging Chinese stocks, which surged on the back of the announcements.

The CSI300 blue-chip index advanced 1.47 percent shortly after the open, while the Shanghai Composite Index jumped 1.62 percent.

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Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index similarly gained more than 1 percent.

“The persistent underperformance of China equities is a barometer of the country’s fundamental economic difficulties, along with falling bond yields,” said Alvin Tan, head of Asia FX strategy at RBC Capital Markets.

“They point to the domestic difficulties. And US tariffs will worsen the problem especially with China growing more reliant on net exports to power growth.”

Trump on Tuesday said his administration was discussing a 10 percent punitive duty on Chinese imports because fentanyl is being sent from China to the US via Mexico and Canada.

The big moves in Chinese stocks helped lift MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan up 0.11 percent, reversing its losses from earlier in the sesion.

Elsewhere, Japan’s Nikkei ticked up 0.47 percent.

In the broader market, global shares gave up some of the enthusiasm from Trump’s mammoth spending plans for artificial intelligence infrastructure that had turbocharged a rally in technology stocks.

Late on Tuesday, he announced a $500 billion private-sector AI infrastructure investment plan from a venture involving Oracle OpenAI and SoftBank even though there was no clarity on funding.

The Information reported on Wednesday that OpenAI and Japanese conglomerate SoftBank will each commit $19 billion to fund the joint venture.

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