The Egyptian protests continued through the weekend and that will worry investors, given the size of Friday’s sell-off in the US in particular
That saw the benchmark S&P 500 index suffer its biggest one-day loss in six months.
And our market will be down after the Share Price Index lost 49 points in trading on Saturday morning.
The Australian dollar rose a touch to close around 99.40 USc, that was despite the US dollar rising 1% against the euro.
And 10-year yields on 10 year Treasuries fell 0.05% to 3.34% as investors also sought safety in US government securities.
In the US the Dow closed down 166.13 points, or 1.39%, to 11823.70, marking its largest one-day drop since November 16.
That saw the Dow fall 0.41% on the week, its first weekly drop in nine weeks.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 index dropped 23.20, or 1.79%, to 1,276.34, its biggest one-day decline since last August.
It fell 0.55% on the week.
And the Nasdaq Composite Index tumbled 68.39, or 2.48%, to 2,686.89, its biggest one-day drop also since last August.
It slipped 0.10% on the week as worries about Amazon’s profit margins saw a sell-off on Friday.
The US economy grew at an annual rate of 3.2% according to the first GDP estimate on Friday, up from 2.6% in the third quarter (or a quarter on quarter rise of 0.8%, from 0.6%).
Though the figure missed economists’ expectations for a slightly higher 3.5% rate, personal consumption, a measure of consumer spending, jumped by 4.4% in the fourth quarter — the strongest increase in that reading in at least four years.
The economy might be improving, but the financial system is still weak.
Four more small US local or regional banks were shut on Friday night.
That took the number of failures so far this year to 11.
In Europe stocks ended lower on Friday with Britain’s FTSE 100 and France’s CAC 40 dropping 1.4%, while the DAX in Germany fell 0.7%.
The Stoxx Europe 600 Index fell 0.3% last week to 280.45, the second successive weekly fall.
London also fell 0.3% for the week.
In Asia, Shanghai rose 0.13% on Friday, while the Hang Seng in Hong Kong slumped 0.7% and Japan’s Nikkei tumbled 1.13%.
The MSCI Asia Pacific Index rose 0.8% to 137.65 last week.
The Nikkei rose 0.8%, Taiwan’s Taiex Index jumped 2.1%, the Shanghai Composite Index advanced 1.4% but Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index lost 1.1%.
India’s Sensitive Index dropped 3.2%; the biggest fall in the region after the central bank lifted interest rates and indicated more rises were possible to fight high inflation.
Losses in Japan came as investors had a chance to react to Thursday’s news that Standard & Poor’s had cut its credit rating to AA minus from AA plus.
In Australia stocks ended lower on Friday and will head even lower this morning.
The S&P/ASX200 index fell 31.2 points, or 0.6%, to 4774.9, but still managed a gain of 0.4% for the week.
The broader All Ordinaries index lost 34.5 points, or 0.7%, to 4872.5.
