After Monday’s worldwide battering, the first minutes of trading on Asian stock markets Tuesday promised more of the same, though as the morning wore on, there were hopeful signs that the markets’ woes may be confined to China.
The Shanghai Composite Index opened trading Tuesday at 3004.13, already down 6.4 percent from the previous close. Monday’s trading itself had seen China’s main stock market drop in value 8.5 percent, its worst single-day decline in almost a decade.
Other indexes were off — albeit not by as much — as traders braced for a repeat of a wild day Monday, which saw the Dow Jones average in the U.S. lose more than 1,000 points at one time, or 6 percent of its value, before rallying to close a mere 588 points lower, or 3.58 percent.
But by late Tuesday morning, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng and Tokyo’s Nikkei indexes had actually gained in value. At about 10:30 p.m. Monday EDT in the U.S., the Japanese index was at 18,725.84, a gain of 1 percent while trading on the Hong Kong market was at 21,800.14, a healthy gain of more than 2.5 percent.
The principal stock markets in Australia and South Korea behaved similarly, opening in the red but reaching positive territory by midday.
• Victor Morton can be reached at vmorton@washingtontimes.com.
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