Pandemic worries, weak jobs data knock global stocks lower

London: Shares slipped in Asia and Europe on Wednesday after a lackluster session on Wall Street, where weak jobs data and pandemic concerns weighed on sentiment.

Tokyo's benchmark rose after economic growth for the April-June quarter was revised upward to an annualised 1.9 per cent from an earlier estimate of 1.3 per cent. "Any feel-good factor was ignored, though, given the climb was less than half of the 4.20 per cent fall in Q1," Jeffrey Halley of Oanda said in a commentary. "Japan will be lucky to break even this year as the current Covid-19 wave will almost certainly have weighed on domestic consumption," he said.

Germany's DAX lost 1.5 per cent to 15,599.69 and the CAC 40 in Paris declined 1.4 per cent to 6,630.07 In London, the FTSE 100 gave up 1.1 per cent to 7,072.28, The future for the Dow industrials shed 0.5 per cent and that for the S&P 500 slipped 0.4 per cent. In Asian trading, Japan's Nikkei 225 index rose 0.9 per cent to 30,181.21, while the Hang Seng in Hong Kong shed early gains, falling 0.1 per cent to 26,320.93.

The Shanghai Composite index gave up 1.4 points to 3,675.19. In Seoul, the Kospi lost 0.8 per cent to 3,162.99. Australia's S&P/ASX 200 lost 0.2 per cent to 7,512.00. Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party is due to elect a new prime minister to succeed Yoshihide Suga, adding to uncertainty over future policy, but fresh stimulus for the world's third-largest economy is expected in the coming weeks, analysts say. On Tuesday, US traders returned from the Labour Day holiday weekend to a relatively light week of economic data, after the last big economic snapshot, the August jobs report, came in weaker than expected last Friday. "Scratching my head to make sense of it all, it appears that US markets are concerned about the hoped-for post-pandemic recovery being somewhat less exuberant than hoped," Halley said. The S&P 500 fell 0.3 per cent to 4,520.03.