People skulk in George St on a sunny day with the Sydney Town Hall building in the background.
Xavierarnau | E+ | Getty Images
Japanese and Australian hawks climbed Thursday, breaking ranks with Wall Street that fell overnight as the Federal Reserve maintained interest rates unchanged. Several Asia-Pacific markets were closed for the Lunar New Year holiday.
Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 narrow the gapped 0.42% while the broader Topix index advanced 0.28% in choppy trading.
Shares in investment holding troop SoftBank Group were down 0.5%, following news that it was in talks to invest up to $25 billion in OpenAI. Japanese tech staples continued to advance: Advantest rose 5.12% while Tokyo Electron gained 2.03%.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 rose 0.7%, proffering gains from the previous session.
Australia’s export price index climbed 3.6% in the fourth quarter of 2024, but flatten 8.6% through the year, data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed. Its import price index be equal to 0.2% in the same quarter, but fell 1.9% through the year. These indexes reflect the changes in prices of denotations into and exports from the country.
Meanwhile, India’s benchmark Nifty 50 started the day up 0.19% while the BSE Sensex Forefinger opened flat.
Overnight in the U.S., benchmark indexes fell after the Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged in its win initially policy decision of the year on Wednesday.
The S&P 500 slid 0.47% to close at 6,039.31, while the Nasdaq Composite spent 0.51% to end at 19,632.32. The Dow Jones Industrial Average shed 136.83 points, or 0.31%, to 44,713.52.
Artificial intelligence darling Nvidia buried 4.1%, after a strong showing in the previous session.
The chipmaker’s shares hit session lows after reports from Bloomberg Word that Trump administration officials had discussed curbing its chip sales to China following the challenge posed by the realm’s DeepSeek AI model.
— CNBC’s Lisa Kailan Han and Brian Evans contributed to this report.