Asian shares on Friday struggled to find clear direction after a week spent seesawing to match the prevailing momentum on Wall Street, where trade faltered overnight after tax hike reports.
Washington is said to be developing a plan to slap new levies on wealthy investors, including a near doubling of the tax on stock transaction profits to 39.6 percent for people earning more than US$1 million.
Any tax plan faces a long process on Capitol Hill before becoming a reality, but analysts said the reports indicate hikes are very much in the mix in Washington.
US President Joe Biden also called for an increase in corporate taxes to finance his US$2 trillion infrastructure package.
The news hit 10-year US Treasury yields and the greenback, while leaving all three main New York stock benchmarks down nearly 1 percent by the Thursday close.
It also sent jitters through digital currency markets, with bitcoin dipping below US$50,000 in Friday morning trade just days after clocking a record above US$63,000.
Yet “past instances of tax-related selling around capital gains tax hikes suggest any equity weakness is likely to be short-lived,” AxiCorp Financial Services Pty chief global markets strategist Stephen Innes said.
“The biggest problem might be a near-term liquidity drain as active traders and hedge funds pull back on a high-frequency activity to re-evaluate strategy, but this should be a temporary speed bump.”
Tokyo led losses, with the Nikkei 225 index down 0.57 percent at 29,020.63, finishing 2.23 percent lower for the week. The TOPIX lost 0.39 percent to 1,914.98, and dropped 2.34 percent from a week earlier.
However, Taiwan’s TAIEX ended up 203.30 points, or 1.19 percent, at the day’s high of 17,300.27, off a low of 17,055.48. Turnover totaled NT$454.263 billion (US$16.16 billion). It rose 0.82 percent from a week earlier.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 rose 0.08 percent to 7,060.7, but lost 0.04 percent for the week.
South Korea’s KOSPI increased 0.27 percent to 3,186.10, declining 0.39 percent from a week earlier.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng gained 1.12 percent to 29,078.75, rising 0.38 percent for the week, while the Shanghai Composite Index was up 0.26 percent for the day and 1.39 percent for the week at 3,474.17.
Additional reporting by staff writer, with CNA
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Micron Technology Inc is a driving force pushing the US Congress to pass legislation that would put new export restrictions on equipment its Chinese competitors use to make their chips, according to people familiar with the matter. A US House of Representatives panel yesterday was to vote on the “MATCH Act,” a bill designed to close gaps in restrictions on chipmaking equipment. It would also pressure foreign companies that sell equipment to Chinese chipmaking facilities to align with export curbs on US companies like Lam Research Corp and Applied Materials Inc. The bill targets facilities operated by China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies Inc
Singapore-based ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab Holdings’ planned acquisition of Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations has yet to enter the formal review stage, as regulators await supplementary documents, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday. Acting FTC Chairman Chen Chih-min (陳志民) told the legislature’s Economics Committee that although Grab submitted its application on March 27, the case has not been officially accepted because required materials remain incomplete. Once the filing is finalized, the FTC would launch a formal probe into the deal, focusing on issues such as cross-shareholding and potential restrictions on market competition, Chen told lawmakers. Grab last month announced that it would acquire
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
RSS