Asia markets largely fall despite Wall Street rally

Japan Prime Minister Fumio Kishida outlined an economic stimulus plan that includes tax breaks for domestic investments and measures to spur wage growth, Japanese media reported.

The Japan Times reported Kishida said his government “aims to encourage investment and wage hikes through measures such as reducing tax and social security burdens.”

Nikkei reported Kishida as saying the hope is to “realize a virtuous economic cycle of capital investment, wage growth and investment in people.”

The stimulus package is also expected to include tax cuts for income from “key strategic fields,” including semiconductors and batteries.

— Lim Hui Jie

Japan’s service producer price index climbed 2.1% year on year in August, its fastest rate of increase in a year.

The reading was higher than July’s 1.7%, and the third straight month that wholesale inflation in the service sector has quickened.

On a month on month basis, the service PPI climbed 0.1%.

— Lim Hui Jie

Bank of America upgraded three European luxury stocks that are bucking the negative trends afflicting the broader sector.

The MSCI index of European luxury goods companies has fallen 16% from its most recent high on Apr. 24 as evidence emerges of slowing demand in the third quarter.

The Wall Street bank has upgraded what it believes is “one of the cheapest stocks” in the sector despite a 45% gain in its share price this year.

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— Ganesh Rao

Moody’s Investors Service warned in a note on Monday that a U.S. government shutdown would be a “credit negative” event for the country.

“It would demonstrate the significant constraints that intensifying political polarization put on fiscal policymaking at a time of declining fiscal strength,” the note said.

Moody’s currently has an AAA stable rating on the U.S. government. Fitch downgraded its view of the the U.S. to AA+ from AAA in August.

Current federal spending laws are set to expire on Sept. 30.

— Jesse Pound

Tech giant Meta seems to be going through an “identity crisis” of sorts, making the stock “uninvestable” right now, according to Adam Coons, chief portfolio manager at Winthrop Capital Management.

The company — which operates social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp – has been through multiple rounds of restructuring, making it hard for investors to “understand what [it] is going to be,” he told CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia” on Monday.

But not everyone agrees, with some analysts calling it their ‘top pick across the internet sector.”

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— Amala Balakrishner

Amazon announced on Monday that it will invest up to $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic and take a minority ownership position in the company. The move comes as Amazon looks to capitalize on the generative AI boom.

Anthropic said it has selected Amazon Web Services as its primary cloud provider. In turn, the startup will provide AWS customers with early access to unique features for model customization and fine-tuning capabilities.

More on the partnership can be found here.

Amazon shares were up 1.2% Monday morning.

— Hakyung Kim, Arjun Kharpal

The Federal Reserve likely is getting closer to the point where it can keep interest rates steady, though at a higher level than the market is used to seeing, Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee said Monday.

“So we’re just going to have to play by ear the how much is still coming down the pike versus how much was expected and was was already in there,” the central bank official said during a CNBC “Squawk Box” interview. “But I think we’re getting close to this spot where it’s going to be more about the how long we hold rather than how high we go.”

Fed officials’ projections released last week about where rates are headed indicated “a little longer than than seemed like what the market had thought,” Goolsbee added.

Indeed, market pricing has adjusted since that Wednesday release, with expectations now pointing to just two quarter-point rate cuts in 2024, aligning with Fed projections, according to CME Group tracking.

—Jeff Cox

It’s possible that oil could hit $100 per barrel in the U.S. and a little higher overseas, Chevron chairman and CEO Mike Wirth told CNBC on Monday.

“We’ve seen a global economy that is continuing to do pretty well. We’ve seen some production cutbacks in some of the OPEC countries come on top of a market that was already showing some tightening,” Wirth said. “It’s fundamentally supply and demand, and prices have been firming here for a number of weeks. I think risks remain more to the upside than the downside.”

Oil prices gained on Monday after Russia relaxed its fuel ban. The energy sector led the broader market and was up 1.3% in early afternoon trading. 

Shares of Chevron were up 1.3%. The stock is up more than 7% this year.

— Pia Singh