Holiday lethargy put a damper on US stocks this week. File picture: AFP A weaker yen lifted Japanese equities on Friday, while Wall Street's major indices slid in quiet holiday trading. Seoul was an outlier in Asia with shares plunging as South Korea's political crisis deepened with a second presidential impeachment vote.'Holiday lethargy is to blame indirectly, yet a more direct weight is the modest weakness among the mega-cap stocks,' said Briefing.com analyst Patrick O'Hare.
He also pointed to an increase in 10-year US Treasury bond yields to around 4.6 percent, which he noted is an increase of nearly 0.9 percentage points since the US Federal Reserve made its first interest rate cut in September. 'The Fed doesn't hold sway over longer-dated maturities like it does over shorter-dated securities, so the bump in rates at the back end of the curve is being watched with an anxious eye as a possible harbinger of a pickup in inflation and/or the budget deficit,' O'Hare said. Wall Street stocks took a knock earlier this month when the Fed indicated it would likely cut interest rates less than it had previously expected to, in part because of uncertainty tied to the stated intention of incoming president Donald Trump to raise tariffs, which could boost inflation that is already proving sticky. In Asia, Japan's Nikkei index closed up nearly two percent, with the yen's recent weakness proving a boon for major exporters. The yen hit 158.08 per US dollar on Thursday evening -- its lowest in almost six months -- following comments made by Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda that failed to give a clear signal on a possible interest rate increase next month. The BoJ left borrowing costs unchanged last week and warned of uncertainty over the economic policies of US president-elect Donald Trump. 'Today, the yen looks stronger on the back of a freshly released set of stronger-than-expected data,' said Ipek Ozkardeskaya, analyst at Swissquote Ban