Tokyo stocks plunged yesterday as the few Asian markets open on Christmas suffered a holiday rout on fears about the US economy and a government shutdown in Washington.
Tokyo markets, which were closed on Monday for a national holiday, plummeted at the open yesterday, with the Nikkei closing down more than 5 percent — more than 1,000 points.
It was the worst finish since April last year and followed a brutal holiday-shortened session on Wall Street that saw US stocks sink for a fourth straight session.
Photo: Bloomberg
In Asia, many markets were closed for Christmas, including in Australia, Hong Kong and South Korea.
US and European markets were also closed for the holiday.
However, the downturn affected those bourses that remained open, with China’s benchmark Shanghai Composite Index tumbling more than 2 percent during the morning session, although it recovered slightly by the afternoon.
Markets have been roiled by ongoing uncertainty in the US, with US Secretary of the Treasury Stephen Mnuchin widely panned for holding a call with the six biggest US banks and then tweeting that the six CEOs have “ample liquidity” available.
Investors were also unnerved by weekend news reports that US President Donald Trump had asked about the possibility of firing US Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, accounts that Mnuchin said Trump had denied.
The central bank last week hiked rates, infuriating Trump, who has ignored the traditional respect for the Fed’s independence, calling it “crazy,” “out of control” and a greater economic threat than China.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average slumped nearly 3 percent by the close on Monday, with the broad-based S&P 500 down 2.7 percent and the tech-rich NASDAQ Composite Index down more than 2 percent.
The declines brought the S&P 500 to the brink of a “bear market,” considered a drop of 20 percent from its peak.
The losses were the worst ever for Wall Street on Christmas Eve, a holiday-shortened session, CNBC reported.
Oanda Corp head of APEC trading Stephen Innes said that Trump’s spat with the Fed and Mnuchin’s call with the banks had “markets running for cover.”
Investors “have no confidence in the administration. Markets are driven by perception and it is flat-out bad,” he said, adding that a stronger yen was adding to the woes for markets in Japan.
“I can’t tell you where the bottom will be as there are various risks,” said Makoto Sengoku, a market analyst at Tokai Tokyo Research Institute. “There are no signs of selling running its course or big buyers emerging.”
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
RSS