Asian Indexes on red again
Thursday, March 18th, 2010
Most major stock indexes in Asia and the Pacific withdrew to negative territory today after strong growth, which reported on Wednesday. Most of the stocks suffered sell-offs of Japanese exporters and those companies from the real estate sector. The regional index MSCI Asia Pacific, which includes stock companies from ten Asian countries plus Australia and New Zealand, losing 0.3 percent of its value today at 124.58 points after the end of yesterday’s session, rose by 1.5% to its highest level in two months. Despite the concerns of investors that are soon to tighten monetary policy in China and the U.S. stock indexes rally in Asia continued during the past six weeks. However, according to some financial analysts has made an assessment of market shares in the region too high. The index of blue chips in Japan, the Nikkei 225 slid 1 percent to 10 744 points yesterday after having surged by 1.2 percent. Shares of Canon and Mazda dropped by more than 2 percent after the yen rose against all major currencies. This makes the price of goods of Japanese exporters higher on foreign markets. Yesterday the Japanese central bank doubled the amount of the special program for lending to commercial banks in the country to 222 billion dollars. Shortly thereafter, the World Bank increased its forecast for economic growth in China, as already expected growth of 9.5 percent this year. Wide Chinese Shanghai Composite Index fell less with 0.1% to 3 046 points and the exchange in Hong Kong Hang Seng lost 0.3% to 21 330.67 points. Today it became clear that the Chinese government will carry out “stress tests” in 12 industries to assess the impact of any lifting of the yuan exchange rate.
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