A man walks past buildings at Central Business District (CBD) in Beijing, China April 8, 2025.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Tingshu Wang | Reuters<\/p>\n
Asia-Pacific markets fell Monday as investors await a slew of economic data from across the region and parse Moody’s downgrade of the U.S. credit rating.<\/p>\n
Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225<\/a> slipped 0.54% at the open while the Topix lost 0.36%. South Korea’s Kospi<\/a> declined 0.47% and the small-cap Kosdaq traded 0.77% lower.<\/p>\n Australia’s benchmark S&P\/ASX 200 was down 0.15% at the open.<\/p>\n Futures for Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index<\/a> stood at 23,270, lower than its last close of 23,345.05.<\/p>\n China is scheduled to release a slate of economic data for April, including housing prices and industrial production.<\/p>\n Thailand is set to report its first-quarter GDP later in the day. The Reserve Bank of Australia will also kickstart its two-day meeting.<\/p>\n On Friday, Moody’s Ratings downgraded the U.S. sovereign credit rating<\/a> by one level from Aaa to Aa1, citing mounting challenges in funding the federal budget deficit and the increasing cost of refinancing debt in a high-interest-rate environment.<\/p>\n With this downgrade, Moody’s has joined the ranks of other major rating agencies<\/a>. S&P made the first move in 2011, and Fitch followed suit in 2023, both reducing the U.S. rating to AA+.<\/p>\n Moody’s latest rating downgrade on its own may not cause a big sell-off in U.S. stock and bond markets as seen from the 2011 and 2023 rating downgrades, Vasu Menon, OCBC’s managing director of the investment strategy team said in a note.<\/p>\n “It does however reinforce concerns about the growing U.S. budget deficit and debt, but these are not new and have been discussed extensively for the past few months, and even years,” he noted.<\/p>\n U.S. stock futures<\/a> declined after the S&P 500 posted a four-day rally on the back of U.S. and China’s temporary tariff cuts and encouraging inflation reports. Futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 292 points, or 0.7%. S&P 500 futures slipped 0.7%, while Nasdaq 100 futures fell 0.8%.<\/p>\n Overnight stateside on Friday<\/a> the three major averages closed mixed. The\u00a0S&P 500<\/a>\u00a0rose for a fifth session and posted a sharp weekly gain, as investors looked past the release of disappointing consumer sentiment data and persistent inflation worry.<\/p>\n The broad market index climbed 0.70% to end at 5,958.38, while the\u00a0Nasdaq Composite<\/a>\u00a0gained 0.52% to close at 19,211.10. The\u00a0Dow Jones Industrial Average<\/a>\u00a0gained 331.99 points, or 0.78%, settling at 42,654.74. Friday’s advance put the 30-stock benchmark into positive territory for 2025.<\/p>\n \u2014 CNBC’s Brian Evans, Pia Singh and Tanaya Macheel contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A man walks past buildings at Central Business District (CBD) in Beijing, China April 8, 2025.\u00a0 Tingshu Wang…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":113022,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3091],"tags":[4959,51,3085,2306,1395,4750,2122,21347,2441,51154,21349,15695,731,16,15,49],"class_list":{"0":"post-113021","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-markets","8":"tag-breaking-news-markets","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-business-news","11":"tag-chicago","12":"tag-china","13":"tag-economic-events","14":"tag-japan","15":"tag-kospi-index","16":"tag-markets","17":"tag-moodys-corp","18":"tag-nikkei-225-index","19":"tag-osaka","20":"tag-thailand","21":"tag-uk","22":"tag-united-kingdom","23":"tag-united-states"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114531686302380396","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113021\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}