Asian equities sink on trade worries

On Monday, Asian stocks dived on resuming trade tensions between America and key economies while crude gave up some of its hefty revenues made after key crude producers agreed to a mild increase in their output.

S&P500 mini futures dived by 0.6% in early trade, MSCI's index of Asia-Pacific equities headed south by 0.25%. Japan's Nikkei went down by 0.4%.

Those dives were provoked by a report from the Wall Street Journal that American leader Donald Trump is on the verge of barring a great number of China’s businesses from investing in American technology companies. Additionally, he intends to block extra technology exports to this Asian country.

As the threat of a full-fledged trade conflict has become extremely real, MSCI's indicator of equities throughout the world has sunk in five for the last six weeks.

Chinese equities turned out to be among the top losers, sinking 3.7% the previous week due to the fact that US leader put the heat on the Chinese government, threatening to impact $200 billion of China’s imports with 10% duties.

Chinese policy makers moved rapidly to tame any potential economic drag from the trade clash with America, with China's key financial institution on Sunday telling it would reduce the amount of cash that some Chinese banks are obliged to hold as reserves by approximately 50 basis points.

Apparently, the reduction in reserves, which is the third by the major financial institution this year, had been widely foreseen by market participants and it’s aimed to speed up the tempo of debt-for-equity swaps and stimulate lending to smaller businesses.

After this move, the CSI300 Index of mainland Chinese equities managed to ascend by 0.1% in early trade.

The index of global car makers <.MIWO0AC00PUS> that lost 4.7% the previous week, was still soft.

geopolitics asia stock market