Stella Qiu & Alun John

BEIJING/HONG KING (Reuters) – Asian shares suffered a severe selloff in Wall Street, with investors concerned about global inflation, China’s zero-COVID policies, and the Ukraine conflict. However, the safe-haven US dollar retained most of its strong overnight gains.

MSCI’s Asia-Pacific broadest index, which excludes Japan, fell 2.4% in the early Asian trading hours. It was the first daily drop in one week. The index fell 2.4%.

It was 1.5% lower for Australia’s resource-heavy index and 2.6% drops in Hong Kong stocks. Blue chips from mainland China suffered a 1% decline. Wall Street was spooked by earnings reports by retail giants overnight. Target Corp (NYSE: ) warned of an increase in fuel costs and freight costs, warning that it will have a greater margin impact. It also reported its quarter-end profit was half as low. Walmart (NYSE:) Inc had warned about similar margin cuts one day earlier.

Target shares fell 24.88% on Wednesday, marking the largest one-day percentage decline since Oct. 19, 1987’s “Black Monday” stock markets crash. The Nasdaq fell almost 5% on Wednesday while the NASDAQ lost 4%.

Hebe Chen from IG, market analyst, stated that Tuesday’s bounce was a result of being ‘too optimistic’. Thus, traders will click the Sell button harder when they feel the doubts stemming out of the misjudgment.

While inflation is a concern that has not gone away since the year 2022, it seems like things are heading toward ‘outof control’. This is the biggest concern for the market.

After rallying on declining risk appetite, the U.S. Dollar halted gains Thursday. On Thursday, it fell 0.05% against other major currencies. On the other side, the Japanese yen fell 0.2% against the US dollar.

As energy prices soared in Britain, inflation in Canada rose to 6.8% last Month. This was primarily due to rising food and shelter costs.

MacroHive’s CEO Bilal Hafeez from London said that there is a bias towards safe-haven assets, especially cash, right now.

Hafeez said that while there might be short-term jumps in equities as the past few days, the main picture is that low yields have ended and we are moving to a more favorable rate environment. All markets which have been able to benefit from low yields, particularly equities, will be under pressure.

U.S. Treasuries surged overnight but were relatively stable in Asia. The benchmark yield was at 2.893%.

This yield rises in line with the expectations of traders of higher Fed Fund rates and reached 2.767% for the two-year close.

The oil futures market was mixed Thursday morning. Oil prices fell 0.2% to $109.38 per barrel. The barrel price rose by 0.26 to $109.4

The spot price of gold was $1,814.8899 an ounce. [GOL/]