By Zhang Mengying
Investing.com – Asia-Pacific stocks were mostly down on Tuesday morning as technology shares led a Wall Street plunge.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 fell 1.85% by 8:45 PM ET (1245 GMT).
South Korea’s KOSPI fell 1.15%.
In Australia, the ASX 200 rose 0.26%.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index was down 1.21%.
China’s Shanghai Composite was down 0.38% while the Shenzhen Component was down 0.22%.
The S&P 500 eased 1.15% and tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 fell 2.19%, and technology shares led a Wall Street slide, including a plunge in Twitter Inc. as Elon Musk pulled out of his deal to buy the firm.
Treasuries extended gains, taking the U.S. 10-year yields to 2.97% while the dollar held its biggest jump in a month toward levels last seen at the height of the market panic over COVID.
Dollar strength will not only “affect this quarter’s earnings, but more likely it’s going to affect the revenue generation outlook for the next couple of quarters, and that, I think, is a big problem,” Bokeh Capital Partners founder and chief investment officer Kimberly Forrest told Bloomberg.
In Asia-Pacific, investors are concerned about another lockdown as Shanghai discovered the first case of the highly infectious BA.5 omicron sub-variant on Sunday. China’s Ministry of Finance is considering allowing local governments to sell 1.5 trillion yuan ($220 billion) of special bonds in the second half of this year to shore up the economy.
Investors are looking to the U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI) for more clues on the U.S. Federal Reserve’s monetary policy path.
Fed Bank of Atlanta President Raphael Bostic said the U.S. economy can cope with higher interest rates and reiterated his support for another interest rate hike this month.