Benchmarks in Tokyo, Hong Kong and Sydney retreated and London and Frankfurt opened lower. Shanghai advanced.Bond markets are "sounding a warning on global growth" as virus fears spread to South Korea, Singapore and other economies, DBS analysts said in a report.
In early trading, the FTSE 100 in London sank 0.5% to 7,402.58 and Frankfurt's DAX lost 0.4% to 13,606.41. France's CAC 40 tumbled 0.6% to 6,019.63. On Thursday, the S&P 500 index lost 0.4% after being down as much as 1.3% at one point. The Dow fell 0.4%. A pickup in economic activity "is still elusive," despite a decline in numbers of new Chinese cases, they wrote.That raised the death toll to 2,236 since December and total cases to 75,465.
South Korea's government declared the area a "special management zone" Friday. The mayor of Daegu urged the city's 2.5 million people to stay home and wear masks even indoors if possible. The decline "underlines that the coronavirus has started to weaken activity," Marcel Thieliant of Capital Economics said in a report.