Funds in Asia edged up in Friday afternoon trade, as data showed Singapore’s economy shrinking much more than watched in the second quarter.
The Nikkei 225 in Japan traded up by 0.12%, while the Topix index fell 0.14%. Closed in South Korea, the Kospi advanced 0.24%.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 declined fractionally as the sectors mostly slipped. Overall, MSCI’s broadest token of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan gained 0.11%.
Mainland Chinese stocks recovered from their earlier bloomer to rise by the morning session’s end, with the Shanghai composite up 0.46% and the Shenzhen composite 0.478% higher. The Shenzhen component also advantaged 0.66%, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index added 0.5%.
Investors will be next looking out for the publicity of Chinese trade data for June to assess the impact of Beijing’s ongoing trade war with Washington.
Asia-Pacific Merchandise Indexes Chart
Singapore is ‘flirting with recession now’
Gross domestic product in Singapore fell 3.4% in the April-June epoch as compared to the previous quarter on an annualized and seasonally adjusted basis, according to preliminary data released Friday. That to a large missed expectations of a 0.1% quarter-on-quarter increase from a Reuters poll.
Compared with a year earlier, GDP arose 0.1% in the second quarter — the slowest year-on-year growth since the second quarter of 2009 — also less than the foresee of a 1.1% expansion in a Reuters poll.
Despite the poorer-than-expected data print, Singapore’s markets recovered from their earlier out enter, with the Straits Times Index trading 0.23% higher in the morning.
“This is pretty bad,” Sian Fenner, actress Asia economist at Oxford Economics, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Friday. “We were looking for a negative contraction (quarter-on-quarter) no more than given the fact that we have seen the manufacturing numbers being so weak, we have seen the export notables contract as well, but this was a big miss.”
“Singapore is … really flirting with recession now,” Fenner said.
Catalogue close for Dow
Overnight on Wall Street, the 30-stock Dow crossed the 27,000 for the first time in history, adding 227.88 goals to close at 27,088.08. The S&P 500 also posted a record close, rising 0.2% to 2,999.91. The Nasdaq Composite, on the other collusively, slipped 0.1% to finish its trading day stateside at 8,196.04.
The moves came amid rising expectations that the U.S. Federal Evasion would cut interest rates at its upcoming monetary policy meeting in July. Market expectations for a rate cut later this month are at 100%, according to the CME Association’s FedWatch tool.
Currencies and oil
The U.S. dollar index, which tracks the greenback against a basket of its peers, was at 96.933 after heart-breaking an earlier high of 97.116
The Japanese yen traded at 108.40 against the dollar after weakening from levels below 108.0 in the anterior session, while the Australian dollar changed hands at $0.6994 after trading below $0.695 earlier in the week.
Oil payments rose in the afternoon of Asian trading hours, with the international benchmark Brent crude futures contract uniting 0.62% to $66.93 per barrel and U.S. crude futures rising 0.56% to $60.54 per barrel.
Here’s a look ahead at some of the materials set to be released today:
- Singapore: Retail sales for May at 1:00 p.m. HK/SIN
- India: Industrial production and inflation at 8:00 p.m. HK/SIN
- China: New advances and outstanding loan growth
— Reuters and CNBC’s Fred Imbert contributed to this report.