BANGKOK — Asian shares have opened mostly higher after U.S. stocks rose to records to close out their latest winning week. U.S. futures and oil prices also climbed.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was an outlier, falling 0.6% to 20,869.39, but the Shanghai Composite gained 0.8% to 3,288.32. The A-share index of the smaller market in Shenzhen picked up 2.2%.
The gains in mainland Chinese markets followed cuts in the one-year and five-year Loan Prime Rates, which are reference rates for lending. Lower rates can help reduce pressure on borrowers, particulary property developers that have suffered following a crackdown on excessive borrowing several years ago.
Given that the main constrain is weak demand, the “heavy lifting” will have to come from government spending, Zichun Huang of Capital Economics said in a report. China’s Finance Ministry has pledged to ramp up such outlays in coming months, “However, we are still skeptical that fiscal easing will be large enough to deliver anything more than a modest and short-lived pick-up in activity.”
Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 index rose 0.3% at 39.078.33, while the Kospi in Seoul surged 0.8% to 2,614.75. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 was up 0.7% to 8,340.40.
Oil prices edged higher after tumbling last week as worries receded that Israel will attack Iranian oil facilities as part of its retaliation for Iran’s missile attack early this month. Iran is a major producer of crude, and a strike could upend its exports to China and elsewhere. Concerns about the strength of demand from China have also hit oil prices.
Early Monday, U.S. benchmark crude was up 38 cents at $69.07 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent crude, the international standard, picked up 31 cents to $73.37 per barrel.
The dollar fell to 149.23 Japanese yen from 149.57 yen late Friday. The yen has weakened recently on expectations that the rate of interest rate hikes by the Bank of Japan may be slower than earlier thought.
The euro slipped to $1.0865 from $1.0867,
On Friday, Wall Street logged more records.
The S&P 500 rose 0.4% to squeak past the all-time high it had set early this week, closing at 5,864.67. The Dow Jones Industrial Average edged 0.1% higher to 43,275.91, another record. The Nasdaq composite climbed 0.6% to 18,489.55.
Trading overall on Wall Street remained relatively calm, as the S&P 500 closed its sixth straight winning week. That’s its longest such winning streak of 2024.
Solid economic data has boosted hopes the U.S. economy can make a perfect escape from the worst inflation in generations, one that ends without a painful recession that many investors had seen as nearly inevitable. And with the Federal Reserve now cutting interest rates to keep the economy humming, the expectation among optimists is that stocks can rise even further.
Netflix helped drive the market with a leap of 11.1% after the streaming giant reported stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected, despite a slowdown in subscriber growth.
It helped offset a 5.2% drop for CVS Health, which said it’s likely to report a profit for the latest quarter that’s well below what analysts had been expecting.
Traders are coalescing around the idea that the Federal Reserve will cut its main interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point at its next meeting in November. Expectations had been high earlier for the Fed to deliver another larger-than-usual cut of half a percentage point, but strong updates on the economy have eliminated those. The federal funds rate is currently sitting in a range of 4.75% to 5%.
