By Gregor Stuart Hunter<\/p>\n
SINGAPORE, May 13 (Reuters) – Asian stocks found their footing after an initial selloff on Wednesday, helped by a turnaround in Korean shares as revived AI optimism dwarfed concerns about stalled talks between Washington and Tehran and hotter-than-expected U.S. inflation.<\/p>\n
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan was up 0.3% \u200cafter rebounding from an earlier decline of as much as 1%. Japan’s Nikkei 225 rose 0.8%, while S&P 500 e-mini futures tacked on 0.2%.<\/p>\n
Korean shares fell as much \u200cas 3.2% on news Samsung Electronics had failed to reach a pay deal with its union before rebounding 2.6% to a record close on reports the government was seeking to manage the situation.<\/p>\n
The Korean market has been on \u200ba tear in recent weeks, breaching records regularly on an AI-led rally that some traders say was ripe for a pullback.<\/p>\n
“Robust AI-led exports by South Korea \u2013 and to a lesser extent, Japan, Singapore and Malaysia \u2013 are buffering the energy price shock,” analysts from Nomura wrote in a research report.<\/p>\n
The conflict in the Middle East remained in a stalemate, as U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he does not think he will need China’s help to end the war with Iran, ahead of his meeting with President Xi Jinping later this week.<\/p>\n
“The U.S.-China summit could trigger moderate index upside \u200cif the truce extends,” Morgan Stanley said in a research note, \u2060lifting its price targets on several Chinese benchmarks. It noted improved earnings, growing supply chain dominance and a stronger yuan.<\/p>\n
The bank also upgraded its recommendation on developed market equities to overweight. “Uncertainties driven by the conflict in the Middle East drive a wider-than-average range of return outcomes, but the \u2060micro and macro fundamentals are largely supportive,” the bank added. “AI and capex related to AI will remain pertinent across asset classes and regions.”<\/p>\n
Other investors expressed scepticism that Trump and Xi’s meeting would lead to significantly improved relations.<\/p>\n
“We\u2019ve seen this movie before, and we know it doesn\u2019t end with a breakthrough agreement that resets the U.S.-China relationship,” said Phillip Wool, chief research officer and head of portfolio management at Rayliant \u200bInvestment \u200bResearch.<\/p>\n
“That creates a pretty low bar for success: As long as Trump and Xi can get along and \u200bthe trade detente continues, that should be enough to count this \u200cmeeting as a win for both sides.”<\/p>\n
Brent crude was down 1.4% at $106.32, snapping a three-day rally. Oil prices have held at or above $100 a barrel since late February, when U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran and Tehran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz rattled supply.<\/p>\n
In Seoul, Samsung Electronics shares plunged as much as 6.1% after the electronics behemoth failed to reach a pay deal with its South Korean labour union on Wednesday, setting the stage for more than 50,000 workers to go ahead with a full strike. However, the stock later rose 1.8% after South Korean Prime Minister Kim Min-seok said the government would support talks to prevent a strike “under any circumstances,” Yonhap News Agency reported.<\/p>\n
Stocks on Wall Street fell on Tuesday, with the S&P \u200c500 0.2% lower and the Nasdaq Composite down 0.7% after U.S. consumer inflation increased by the most in \u200bthree years in April, raising the risk the Federal Reserve will be forced to raise rates earlier than \u200bexpected.<\/p>\n
Markets have largely priced out any chance of a rate cut from the Fed \u200bthis year, while expectations for a hike of at least 25 basis points at the December meeting have risen to over 35% from below \u200c22% earlier in the week, according to CME’s FedWatch Tool.<\/p>\n
The yield on \u200bthe U.S. 10-year Treasury bond was down 1.0 basis \u200bpoints at 4.459%, edging back after hitting the highest level since July.<\/p>\n
The U.S. dollar index, which measures the greenback’s strength against a basket of six major peers, held steady at 98.369, on track for its third consecutive day of gains.<\/p>\n
Against the yen, the dollar traded 0.1% firmer at 157.73 after the Japanese currency briefly spiked Tuesday \u200bon “rate check” speculation, often seen as a precursor to intervention.<\/p>\n
Markets are \u200con edge for any action by Tokyo after sources said authorities had intervened in the past two weeks to arrest the yen’s decline.<\/p>\n
In early European trades, \u200bpan-region futures were up 0.9%, German DAX futures rose 0.8% and FTSE futures gained 0.6%.<\/p>\n
Elsewhere, gold was down 0.1% at $4,708.24, while bitcoin was up 0.5% at $81,110.13 \u200band ether nudged up 0.8% to $2,301.66.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Gregor Stuart HunterEditing by Shri Navaratnam and Sam Holmes)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Gregor Stuart Hunter SINGAPORE, May 13 (Reuters) – Asian stocks found their footing after an initial selloff…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":482317,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[174],"tags":[79,169589,179,18,19,17,386,10595,30725,2428,3997],"class_list":{"0":"post-482316","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-conflict-in-the-middle-east","10":"tag-economy","11":"tag-eire","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-japan","15":"tag-president-donald-trump","16":"tag-samsung-electronics","17":"tag-south-korea","18":"tag-xi-jinping"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116566512448465106","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=482316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482316\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/482317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=482316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=482316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=482316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}