Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index lost 2 percent at the start of trading, while Japan’s Topix and South Korea’s Kospi fell as much as 1.3 percent and 1 percent, respectively. The Australian S & P / ASX 200 was generally stable. The Hang Seng Tech Index, which tracks Chinese technology companies listed in Hong Kong, fell 3%, closing 1.4% lower on Thursday. The moves followed the falls on Wall Street amid growing pessimism about peace talks in Ukraine, high inflation and the expectation of several interest rate hikes this year. The Wall Street S&P 500 benchmark closed down 1.6%, while the Nasdaq Composite lost 1.5%. This led to year-on-year index losses of 4.9 percent and 9.1 percent, respectively, for their worst quarterly performance in two years. Brent crude, the international benchmark, fell 0.4 percent to $ 104.34 a barrel on Friday, while the US West Texas Intermediate index fell 0.5 percent to $ 99.84. Oil fell sharply on Thursday when the White House announced a “historic release” of about 180 million barrels from US emergency reserves in a bid to cut prices. The yield on the 10-year US bond, which is moving in the opposite direction in terms of price, gained 0.06 percentage points, reaching 2.38%. The two-year bond yield added 0.08 percentage points to just under 2.37%.
