Asian shares, US futures, and the dollar fall following Wall Street’s positive week

HONG KONG: Asian shares declined on Monday, accompanied by weakening U.S. futures and the dollar following Moody’s Ratings decision to downgrade the sovereign credit rating for the United States due to its inability to curb increasing debt levels.

The future for the S&P 500 dropped by 0.9%, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average futures fell by 0.6%. The U.S. dollar also decreased to 145.14 Japanese yen from 145.65 yen, whereas the euro remained steady at $1.1183.

In China, stock markets experienced declines after reports showed that retail sales only increased by 5.1% in April compared to the previous year, falling short of expectations. Furthermore, growth in industrial output slowed to 6.1% year-on-year from 7.7% in March.

That could mean rising inventories if production outpaces demand even more than it already does. But it also may reflect some of the shipping boom before some of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods took effect.

“After an improvement in March, China’s economy looks to have slowed again last month, with firms and households turning more cautious due to the trade war,” Julian Evans-Pritchard of Capital Economics said in a report.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng lost 0.7% to 23,184.74 and the Shanghai Composite Index edged 0.2% lower to 3,361.72.

Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 gave up 0.4% to 37,605.85 while the Kospi in Seoul dropped 1% to 2,600.57.

Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 declined 0.1% to 8,333.80.

Taiwan’s Taiex was 0.8% lower.

Wall Street cruised to a strong finish last week as U.S. stocks glided closer to the all-time high they set just a few months earlier, though it may feel like an economic era ago.

The S&P 500 rose 0.7% to 5,958.38 for a fifth straight gain. It has rallied to within 3% of its record set in February after it briefly dropped roughly 20% below it last month.

Gains have been driven by hopes that Trump will lower his tariffs against other countries after reaching trade deals with them.

The Dow industrials added 0.8% to 42,654.74, and the Nasdaq composite climbed 0.5% to 19,211.10.

Trump’s trade war sent financial markets reeling because they could slow the economy and drive it into a recession, while also pushing inflation higher.

This week featured some encouraging news on each of those fronts. The United States and China announced a 90-day stand-down in most of their punishing tariffs against each other, while a couple of reports on inflation in the United States came in better than economists expected.

That uncertainty has been hitting U.S. households and businesses, raising worries that they may freeze their spending and long-term plans. The latest reading in a survey of U.S. consumers by the University of Michigan showed sentiment soured again in May, though the pace of decline wasn’t as bad as in prior months.

Perhaps more worryingly, expectations for coming inflation keep building, and U.S. consumers are now bracing for 7.3% in the next 12 months, according to the University of Michigan’s preliminary survey results. That’s up from a forecast of 6.5% a month before.

Charter Communications rose 1.8% after it said Friday that it has agreed to merge with Cox Communications in a deal that would combine two of the country’s largest cable companies. The resulting company will change its name to Cox Communications and keep Charter’s headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut.

CoreWeave jumped 22.1% after Nvidia disclosed that it had increased its ownership stake in the company, whose cloud platform helps customers running artificial-intelligence workloads. Nvidia now owns 7% of CoreWeave, up from its nearly 6% stake before CoreWeave’s initial public offering of stock in March.

Novo Nordisk’s stock that trades in the United States fell 2.7% after the Danish company behind the Wegovy drug for weight loss said that Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen will step down as CEO and that the board is looking for his successor. The company cited “recent market challenges” and how the stock has been performing recently.

Hope remains that this week’s better-than-expected signals on inflation could give the Federal Reserve more leeway to cut interest rates later this year if high tariffs drag down the U.S. economy.

In oil trading early Monday, U.S. benchmark crude oil lost 18 cents to $61.79 per barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, gave up 20 cents to $65.21 per barrel.