Welcome to Hong Kong, where reasons to sell stocks are mounting ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday. The MSCI Hong Kong Index slumped as much as 2.8% Tuesday, hitting its 200-day moving average and lagging other benchmarks in Asia. Many property firms were among the biggest decliners, along with casino operators in nearby Macau.
Stock indexes were down more than 1% in China, outpacing declines elsewhere in Asia, while Asian currencies were widely lower. The Chinese yuan weakened as much as 0.46% against the U.S. dollar, its biggest drop since September, after a run of big gains. China’s 10-year government-bond yield continued to fall, hitting a fresh four-month low Tuesday at 3.045%.
Moody’s said Monday that"the absence of tangible plans to address either the political or economic and social concerns of the Hong Kong population that have come to the fore in the past nine months may reflect weaker inherent institutional capacity than Moody’s had previously assessed.” That could be shaken by new developments on the new virus originating in central China. Medical workers being infected signals it could be more easily transmitted than previously thought, raising concerns about a potential repeat of the 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, which killed almost 800 people.