The Asian markets concluded Thursday’s trade mostly in green following a third straight rally on Wall Street. Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda stated that aggressive easy policy launched last April will continue and will take Japan out of years of deflation. Kuroda added that the outlook for consumer prices was up, with the year-on-year rate in core consumer prices expected to be around 1.25% for some time, not including a sales tax hike on April 1 to 8% from 5%. Kuroda enlightened that BOJ’s mantra will continue with quantitative and qualitative easing, aiming to achieve the price stability target of 2%, by 2015. Japanese Household Confidence rose to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 37.5.
China’s slump in property sales and construction is spurring speculation that the government’s four-year-old campaign of real-estate controls will start to crack. The value and volume of home sales in China fell more quickly in the first three months of this year from the January-February period as parties continued to adopt a wait-and-see stance. The value of new homes sold across the country shed 7.7% from the same period a year earlier to 1.1 trillion yuan ($177 billion) during the first quarter. In the first two months of the year, the value fell 5% year on year. The volume of new homes sold fell 5.7% from a year ago to 178.3 million square meters while it shed 1.2% in the first two months.
Asian Indices | Last Trade | Change in Points | Change in % |
Shanghai Composite | 2098.89 | -6.24 | -0.30 |
Hang Seng | 22760.24 | 64.23 | 0.28 |
Jakarta Composite | 4897.05 | 24.04 | 0.49 |
KLSE Composite | 1850.54 | 5.17 | 0.28 |
Nikkei 225 | 14417.53 | -0.15 | - |
Straits Times | 3253.80 | 0.60 | 0.02 |
KOSPI Composite | 1992.05 | -0.16 | -0.01 |
Taiwan Weighted | 8944.16 | 20.34 | 0.23 |