MARKET AT 7
Good evening. A circuit breaker tripped in Seoul today, one of the sharpest single-session falls South Korea's benchmark has had all year, after hot US inflation data reignited doubts about who's actually paying for the AI boom's compute bill. Back home, a weak jobs report should have been bad news for the ASX. Instead, it's the reason the index barely moved. H
MARKET AT 7
Kospi crashes as AI-funding fears spread, Australian jobs data cools selloff
Kospi crashes, Australian jobs data cools ASX selloff
South Korea's Kospi fell as much as 8% on Thursday, tripping a 20-minute trading halt, its 10th circuit breaker this year, before paring the loss to around 7% by early afternoon, its seventh straight losing session, BigGo Finance reports. Samsung Electronics fell as much as 9.7% and SK Hynix as much as 11.35%; together the two chipmakers make up nearly half the index's value. Wednesday's hotter-than-expected US inflation data was the trigger, raising fears the Federal Reserve holds rates higher for longer. The sharper worry sat closer to home: CoreWeave, a major AI cloud provider, fell 15.46% as its bonds traded at distressed yields above 15% on doubts it can keep funding its debt-backed data-centre build-out. Foreign investors sold a net 3.42 trillion won of Kospi shares, their eighth straight session as net sellers.
Australia felt the inflation scare differently. The ASX 200 opened down almost 1% before September's labour force figures landed at 11:30am: unemployment rose to 4.7%, above the 4.6% forecast, and employment fell by 39,300 against an expected gain of 20,000, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reports. Weak as it was, the data cooled bets on another Reserve Bank rate hike and the three-year bond yield fell, enough to send bank stocks surging and drag the index back from the brink. The ASX 200 finished at 8,719.7, down just 8 points, or 0.09%, Market Index reports. Commonwealth Bank rose 3.2%, Bank of Queensland jumped 5.8% on its annual result, and Westpac and NAB each added around 3%, with Bendigo Bank close behind. Materials sank 3.95% on BHP and Rio Tinto's roughly 4.7% falls, and tech dropped 3.41% as data-centre stocks slid: Megaport led the fall at 10.1%, while Macquarie Technology and NextDC each dropped more than 7%. New Zealand's NZX 50 held up better, adding about 0.7% to roughly 13,770, Trading Economics shows. The Australian dollar slipped 0.26% to US$0.6954.
ALSO TODAY
Wall Street logs its worst session since July. September's consumer price index rose 3.7% from a year earlier, against a 3.6% forecast, with core prices up 0.3% for the month. It was hot enough to send the Nasdaq Composite down 1.9% to 26,692.87, its steepest drop since 23 July, the S&P 500 down 1.1% to 7,718.94, its biggest fall since 29 July, and the Dow down 0.1% to 51,621.48, Yahoo Finance and ICMarkets report.
Gold slips even as bond yields tumble. US Treasury yields fell sharply in Asian trade as investors piled into bonds on the hot inflation print, pulling the US dollar down too, ordinarily a setup for gold to climb. It didn't: spot gold closed the Australian trading day down 1.3% at US$4,105 an ounce, Market Index reports.
Bitcoin drops below $81,000 as the risk-off mood spreads to crypto. The largest cryptocurrency fell 3.8% in 24 hours to around US$80,800, dragging the wider crypto market down 2.7% to US$2.83 trillion, with roughly $1 billion in leveraged positions liquidated, Coinpedia reports.
THE MARKET WRAP
OUR TAKE:
Twenty minutes was how long it took Seoul's circuit breaker to fire today, and what tripped it wasn't actually Korean. CoreWeave's bonds are trading above a 15% yield because nobody's quite sure it can keep paying for the data centres it's already built.
Samsung and SK Hynix just happened to be standing in the blast radius, since they make the chips those data centres run on. Back home, a weak jobs report calmed the market down, which sounds backwards until you remember what traders actually price: one less reason for the Reserve Bank to raise rates again. That single calculation did more for the ASX today than any bank's own result. Call it what it is: a rate bet, not a verdict on the banks themselves.