Asia-Pacific markets fell Thursday, tracking Wall Street’s declines on concerns about U.S.-China trade relations.<\/p>\n
Trade fears resurfaced after Reuters\u00a0reported Wednesday<\/a> stateside that the Trump administration is considering curbs on exports to China that are made with U.S. software, citing a U.S. official and three people briefed by U.S. authorities.<\/p>\n The sources said that the plan, which could cover a wide range of items from laptops to jet engines, might not move forward, however, and that it’s not the only option that’s being discussed.<\/p>\n Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225<\/a> index retreated 1.52% in early trade, while the Topix declined 0.71%.<\/p>\n Shares of SoftBank tumbled more than 6% in early trading after it announced plans to issue U.S.-dollar and euro-denominated bonds, according to a filing<\/a> on the Tokyo stock exchange Thursday, as the company amps up its artificial intelligence investments.<\/p>\n The Japanese conglomerate will issue around $2 billion U.S.-dollar-denominated bonds in two tranches, and about 750 million euros ($870 million) worth of hybrid notes. These will have interest rates between 6.5% and 8.25%.<\/p>\n SoftBank said that the money raised will be used for “general business purposes,” according to a Google translation of the filing.<\/p>\n Investors in Asia will also look to the Bank of Korea’s policy rate decision later in the day. The country’s central bank is expected to keep its benchmark interest rate unchanged at 2.5% according to economists polled by Reuters, as policymakers continue to flag household debt as a key risk.<\/p>\n South Korea’s Kospi index plunged 1.5%, while the small-cap Kosdaq lost 1%.<\/p>\n Australia’s ASX\/S&P 200 fell 0.33%.<\/p>\n Futures of Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index<\/a> pointed to a lower open, trading at 25,647, against the index’s previous close of 25,781.77.<\/p>\n U.S. equity futures edged lower in early Asia hours after the three key benchmarks in the U.S. fell Wednesday stateside. Disappointing corporate earnings from companies including\u00a0Texas Instruments<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Netflix<\/a>\u00a0also weighed on the major averages.<\/p>\n Overnight, the\u00a0Dow Jones Industrial Average<\/a>\u00a0closed lower by 334.33 points, or 0.71%, at 46,590.41. The\u00a0S&P 500<\/a>\u00a0fell 0.53% to finish at 6,699.40, while the\u00a0Nasdaq Composite<\/a>\u00a0shed 0.93% to settle at 22,740.40.<\/p>\n At session lows, the Dow was down more than 400 points, or about 1%, while the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq decreased 1.2% and 1.9%, respectively.<\/p>\n \u2014 CNBC’s Sean Conlon and Pia Singh contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Asia-Pacific markets fell Thursday, tracking Wall Street’s declines on concerns about U.S.-China trade relations. Trade fears resurfaced after…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":325215,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[8000,133,64,81,11764,8708,7994,267,135,7997,67,132,68,27231,7999],"class_list":{"0":"post-325214","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-markets","8":"tag-asia-economy","9":"tag-breaking-news-markets","10":"tag-business","11":"tag-business-news","12":"tag-central-banking","13":"tag-currency-markets","14":"tag-hang-seng-index","15":"tag-interest-rates","16":"tag-markets","17":"tag-nikkei-225-index","18":"tag-united-states","19":"tag-unitedstates","20":"tag-us","21":"tag-world-economy","22":"tag-world-markets"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115420822507003695","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=325214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325214\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/325215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=325214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=325214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=325214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}