Stockmarkets seemed poised to sell off on Friday if the July 6 deadline for the imposition of 25% tariffs on some Chinese exports passes without any attempt to delay or limit the impact.
July 6 is the deadline when the US is set to impose tariffs on $US50 billion worth of goods from China. China will impose its own tariffs on a reported $US34 billion of US exports.
Reuters reported that because of time differences, the Chinese tariffs will be imposed several hours earlier than in the US.
China has says it will match that with the valuable export of soybeans to China by the US in line to have a damaging tariff imposed by Beijing, a move that will rattle farm confidence in the US as it looks at the worst a year of low incomes because of sliding prices and demand.
News a Chinese court temporarily banned Micron Technology of the uS from selling chips in China, the world’s biggest memory chip market, hitting shares in American and Asian semiconductor stocks.
That helped knock confidence in US markets on Tuesday. That came a day after the US claimed national security concerns in moving to stop China Mobile —the world’s biggest mobile operator in terms of subscribers—from entering the US telecoms markets.
As a result Asian stock markets mostly finished with losses Wednesday, thanks to the slide in the region’s technology stocks. That fall was taken up in Europe with markets down as well.The US was closed for the July 4 holiday.
The Shanghai Composite closed down 1%,taking the fall in the past month to 11.1% (a correction) and almost 17% year to date. while the tech-heavy China Shenzhen ChiNext Composite slid 2.6% to be down 12% in the past month and nearly 18% this year so far.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index lost 1.1%, while Japan’s Nikkei and Korea’s Kospi each dropped 0.3%. Taiwan stocks ended flat.
New Zealand’s NZX 50 fell 0.3%, while the ASX 200 lost 0.4%.
