BANGKOK (AP) – Shares were mixed yesterday in Asia, where Chinese stocks surged after a government investment fund said it would step up stock purchases and a report said leader Xi Jinping was set to meet with officials to discuss the markets.
Oil prices rose and United States (US) futures were mixed.
Bloomberg reported that Xi was to be briefed by officials about the markets, underscoring the ruling Communist Party’s concern over a slump that has wiped out trillions of dollars in market value over the past several years.
Citing unnamed officials, it said the timing of the briefing was uncertain. The report could not be confirmed.
But markets jumped after it was published, with Hong Kong’s Hang Seng surging four per cent to 16,133.60 in a rally led by technology shares such as e-commerce giant Alibaba, which gained 7.7 per cent and JD.com, which was up 7.7 per cent. Online food delivery company Meituan jumped 6.5 per cent.
The Shanghai Composite index climbed 3.2 per cent to 2,789.49. In China’s smaller main market, the Shenzhen Component index soared 6.2 per cent, while the CSI 1000, an exchange-traded fund that often is used to track so-called “snowball derivatives”, investment products that can pay big gains but also can result in exaggerated losses, advanced seven per cent.
The latest salvo in the government’s campaign to prop up sagging markets came with a promise by China’s Central Huijin Investment, a sovereign fund that owns China’s state-run banks and other big government controlled enterprises, to expand its purchases of stock index funds.
The fund periodically steps up buying of shares in big state-owned banks and other companies to counter heavy selling pressure in the Chinese markets.
On Monday, benchmarks in Shanghai and the smaller market in Shenzhen bounced between small gains and big losses, while share prices of state-run banks and other big companies rose.
Elsewhere in Asia, Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 index fell 0.5 per cent to 36,160.66 and the Kospi in South Korea lost 0.6 per cent, to 2,576.20.
