Asian shares won some respite on Tuesday after Washington temporarily eased trade restrictions imposed last week on China
TOKYO (Reuters) – Asian shares won some respite on Tuesday after Washington temporarily eased trade restrictions imposed last week on China’s Huawei, although fears of a further escalation in tensions kept investors on edge.
Financial spread-betters expect London’s FTSE Frankfurt’s DAX and Paris’s CAC to gain between 0.3% and 0.5% when they open.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan was up by a marginal 0.1% but stayed not far from a four-month low touched on Friday.
It has fallen almost 8% from a nine-month peak hit just over a month ago. Japan’s Nikkei average retreated 0.3%.
China’s blue-chip CSI300 index jumped 1.4%, a day after it fell to a three-month intraday low as Washington allowed Huawei Technologies Co Ltd to purchase American-made goods in order to maintain existing networks and provide software updates to existing Huawei handsets until Aug. 19. The benchmark Shanghai Composite climbed 1.2%.
Still, an increasingly acrimonious atmosphere between the world’s two biggest economies has led investors to abandon any hopes of an early resolution, a sea change from just a few weeks ago when a deal was considered to be within reach.
“With the news around the U. S. and Huawei taking a turn for the worse, it seems that the trade war is increasingly showing signs of becoming a tech war,” said Seema Shah, senior global investment Strategist at Principal Global Investors in London.
