Asia Down On Ebola Scare; Wall St Dips
Asian stocks fell on Thursday, dragged lower after the first case of Ebola diagnosed in the United States spooked Wall Street overnight, while a bout of risk aversion pushed down yields and put the dollar's recent rally on pause.
MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan dipped 0.2 percent, and Tokyo's Nikkei shed 1.3 percent.
Hong Kong streets were calm early on Thursday while police largely kept their distance from tens of thousands of mostly young people who have continued to protest for nearly a week.
US Stocks Dip
U.S. stocks dropped more than 1 percent on Wednesday as the Ebola news scared investors, economic data pointed to uneven growth, and the Russell 2000 index of small-cap shares entered correction territory.
The dollar traded at 109.025 yen, suffering a sharp fall on declining U.S. Treasury yields after poking above the psychological 110 threshold the previous day for the first time since 2008.
The euro stood little changed at $1.2628 after crawling away from a two-year low of $1.2571 that hit earlier in the week.
In commodities, crude oil posted a modest rebound after declining sharply through much of the week on weak economic signals from China and Europe and ample worldwide supply.
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Ridiculous, it is not Ebola that dropped the market today, it's the result of the effects of years of terrible monetary policies by the Federal Reserve and government that are now being felt. Mainly those are planned economy, endless free money to TBTF banks, socialization of property loans through Fannie and Freddie, policies of money creation that reward mainly banks for doing nothing, perversion of risk reward in stocks, and the general rejection and destruction of free market signaling and capitalism replaced by increasing socialism and dependence on government and central bank feeding frenzies that bear no logic to the real economy or rational thought but encourage wreckless spending and penalizes all but banks from accruing capital.
This behavior is a flat out denial of capitalism and needs to end.
I don't get it. Why would Ebola cause this shift?
I wholeheartedly agree. I reminds me of when people say 'bad weather' is the cause of stocks falling. It's just an excuse. Like you said, a flat out denial. Bad weather? I don't think so. More like underspending on the part of the consumers.