It turns out, the biggest financial victim of US President Donald Trump’s decision to strike Iran is not the S&P 500, but equity markets across North Asia.
Panic selling was sweeping across Hong Kong, Seoul and Tokyo on Wednesday. South Korea’s benchmark KOSPI headed for its biggest two-day drop since 2008.
The selloff might have come as somewhat of a surprise for investors. North Asia is known for its dependence on oil and natural gas imports, but if we are talking about an economic meltdown, the Iran conflict might be pushing Europe into an energy crisis first. In addition, unless the closure of the Strait of Hormuz gets prolonged, economies in the region have got buffers thanks to their national reserves. Japan has an estimated 254 days of oil stockpile; China’s domestic gas holdings are worth about an entire year of its Gulf imports.
So why are North Asian markets so vulnerable?
Often, steep market declines have a lot more to do with flows than fundamentals. Prior to the Iranian crisis, hot money was flooding into Asia, looking for semiconductor and hard tech plays as global investors rotated out of software companies into artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. The broadening of the AI trade laid the foundation for this week’s rout.
Indeed, until now, the investment narratives were all for Asian hard tech. Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc were believed to have entered a years-long super cycle, after both companies said that the supply crunch in memory chips would continue until next year.
Meanwhile, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s strong earnings bolstered the case that US hyperscalers would keep on spending, ensuring windfalls for Asian suppliers.
No surprise that hot money chased after the few winners. In the US, the US$16 billion iShares MSCI South Korea ETF recorded more than US$1.2 billion in inflows in the week before the Middle East turmoil, the most in the fund’s 25-year history. In South Korea, retail investors, who for decades skirted the blue-chip KOSPI, went on a buying spree. The number of active accounts and margin loans both hit record highs.
In other words, the Asian AI infrastructure trade was getting crowded.
As the Iran conflict drags on, the tide is starting to recede. A sudden strengthening of the US dollar is eroding the case for investing in emerging markets. Meanwhile, there are worries that local benchmark interest rates will have to rise as an extended oil shock pushes up inflation. Higher money market rates raise the cost of margin-financed trading. Until recently, financial conditions in South Korea were at multi-decade lows.
It is perhaps best to consider the selloff as a painful, but healthy cleansing. It deleverages and chases away momentum-driven speculators. What is left will be those who care about company earnings and reasonable valuations. After all, upward earnings revisions are a lot stronger in Asia than in the US.
International diversification has been a major theme this year as global asset managers look to reduce their heavy exposure to US assets, but the one-way traffic into North Asia has been so heavy that an exogenous shock thousands of miles away is creating sharp reversals. Unfortunately, the “sell America” trade has morphed into a blanket selling of Asian assets.
Shuli Ren is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Asian markets. A former investment banker, she was a markets reporter for Barron’s. She is a CFA charterholder. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long been expansionist and contemptuous of international law. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), the CCP regime has become more despotic, coercive and punitive. As part of its strategy to annex Taiwan, Beijing has sought to erase the island democracy’s international identity by bribing countries to sever diplomatic ties with Taipei. One by one, China has peeled away Taiwan’s remaining diplomatic partners, leaving just 12 countries (mostly small developing states) and the Vatican recognizing Taiwan as a sovereign nation. Taiwan’s formal international space has shrunk dramatically. Yet even as Beijing has scored diplomatic successes, its overreach
For Taiwan, the ongoing US and Israeli strikes on Iranian targets are a warning signal: When a major power stretches the boundaries of self-defense, smaller states feel the tremors first. Taiwan’s security rests on two pillars: US deterrence and the credibility of international law. The first deters coercion from China. The second legitimizes Taiwan’s place in the international community. One is material. The other is moral. Both are indispensable. Under the UN Charter, force is lawful only in response to an armed attack or with UN Security Council authorization. Even pre-emptive self-defense — long debated — requires a demonstrably imminent
Since being re-elected, US President Donald Trump has consistently taken concrete action to counter China and to safeguard the interests of the US and other democratic nations. The attacks on Iran, the earlier capture of deposed of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and efforts to remove Chinese influence from the Panama Canal all demonstrate that, as tensions with Beijing intensify, Washington has adopted a hardline stance aimed at weakening its power. Iran and Venezuela are important allies and major oil suppliers of China, and the US has effectively decapitated both. The US has continuously strengthened its military presence in the Philippines. Japanese Prime
After “Operation Absolute Resolve” to capture former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, the US joined Israel on Saturday last week in launching “Operation Epic Fury” to remove Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his theocratic regime leadership team. The two blitzes are widely believed to be a prelude to US President Donald Trump changing the geopolitical landscape in the Indo-Pacific region, targeting China’s rise. In the National Security Strategic report released in December last year, the Trump administration made it clear that the US would focus on “restoring American pre-eminence in the Western hemisphere,” and “competing with China economically and militarily
RSS