Stock market today: Asian shares are mostly lower ahead of key US inflation report

BANGKOK (AP) — Shares fell Thursday in most Asian markets ahead of a key U.S. inflation report due Friday that might point the way ahead for interest rates.

Benchmarks fell more than 1% in Tokyo, Hong Kong and Sydney. Oil prices and U.S. futures also declined.

The markets' big focus this week is on a U.S. government inflation report due Friday. The personal consumption expenditures index, or PCE, is the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of inflation, and analysts said investors were in a wait-and-see posture after recent mixed data.

The latest updates on inflation could influence the central bank’s decision on when to begin cutting interest rates, which remain at their highest level in more than 20 years and which are having an impact worldwide.

In Asian trading, another set of measures to boost the Chinese property market failed to lift market sentiment. Hong Kong's Hang Seng fell 1.9% to 17,746.53, while the Shanghai composite index was down 0.5%.

The latest move was by Beijing, one of China's biggest cities, when China's capital cut minimum down-payment ratios and mortgage interest rates, beginning Thursday.

Other Chinese cities have taken similar measures in line with national policies aimed at enticing buyers back into a market that has languished since the government cracked down on excessive borrowing by property developers, causing dozens of such companies to default on their debts. The downturn has dragged on the entire economy, the world's second largest.

In Tokyo, the Nikkei 225 index was down 1% at 39,286.97 amid concern over further weakness in the Japanese yen.

The U.S. dollar was trading at 160.43 yen early Thursday, having punched through the 160 level a day earlier. Japanese officials have warned they may intervene in the market to counter the trend, which has both positive and negative effects on the economy.

Elsewhere in Asia, Australia's S&P/ASX 200 fell 1% to 7,708.10, while shares also fell in Taiwan and India. Bangkok's SET fell, while shares rose in Jakarta and Singapore.

On Wednesday, a mostly subdued day of trading left benchmarks on Wall Street close to all-time highs they set last week.

The S&P 500 index rose 0.2% to 5,477.90 after drifting between small gains and losses most of the day. About 65% of the stocks in the benchmark index fell.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished less than 0.1% higher, at 39,127.80, while the Nasdaq composite rose 0.5% to 17,805.16.

Several big stocks helped offset the broader decline in the S&P 500.

Amazon.com rose 3.9%, surpassing $2 trillion in market value for the first time. Its rise comes just days after Nvidia hit $3 trillion, briefly becoming the most valuable company on Wall Street.

Chipotle eked out a 0.3% gain on the first day of trading after its 50-for-1 stock split. It was previously among the most expensive stocks in the S&P 500.

FedEx helped offset the losses with a gain of 15.5%. The package carrier reported results for its latest quarter that easily beat forecasts. Rivian soared 23.2% after Volkswagen said it would invest up to $5 billion in the struggling maker of electric vehicles.

Several big technology companies gained ground. Apple rose 2% and Microsoft gained 0.3%. Their large values tend to heavily influence the direction of the market.

Investors are hoping that the Federal Reserve will soon begin cutting interest rates but its effort to tame inflation back to its 2% target has been arduous. Wall Street is betting on a rate cut at the central bank's September meeting.

The economy has remained relatively strong, despite inflation and high borrowing costs for consumers and businesses. Economic growth has been slowing, though, and consumers are seemingly more stressed and shifting spending to necessities. Wall Street is hoping that Fed can time its rate cuts so that it relieves pressure on the economy before it slows too much, but doesn't also fall short of its goal of cooling inflation.

In other dealings, benchmark U.S. crude oil lost 21 cents to $80.69 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent crude, the international standard, shed 19 cents to $84.28 per barrel.

The euro rose to $1.0693 from $1.0681.

AP Business Writers Damian J. Troise and Stan Choe contributed.

The Fearless Girl statue stands in front of the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday, June 26, 2024 in New York. Shares have advanced in Europe and Asia after a rebound for Nvidia offset weakness on Wall Street. (AP Photo/Peter Morgan)

The New York Stock Exchange is shown on Tuesday, June 25, 2024 in New York. World stocks are mixed after another slide for Wall Street heavyweight Nvidia kept U.S. indexes mixed Monday, even as the majority of stocks rallied. (AP Photo/Peter Morgan)

Currency traders work near the screen showing the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI), top left, and the foreign exchange rate between U.S. dollar and South Korean won, top right, at the foreign exchange dealing room of the KEB Hana Bank headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, June 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

Currency traders watch monitors near the screen showing the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) at the foreign exchange dealing room of the KEB Hana Bank headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, June 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

A currency trader passes under the screen showing the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI), top left, and the foreign exchange rate between U.S. dollar and South Korean won, top center, at the foreign exchange dealing room of the KEB Hana Bank headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, June 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

Former President Donald Trump is stepping up his demands that the winner of the presidential race be declared shortly after polls close Tuesday, well before all the votes are counted.

Trump set the pattern in 2020, when he declared that he had won during the early morning hours after Election Day. That led his allies to demand that officials “stop the count!” He and many other conservatives have spent the past four years falsely claiming that fraud cost him that election and bemoaning how long it takes to count ballots in the U.S.

But one of many reasons we are unlikely to know the winner quickly on election night is that Republican lawmakers in two key swing states have refused to change laws that delay the count. Another is that most indications are this will be a very close election, and it takes longer to determine who won close elections than blowouts.

In the end, election experts note, the priority in vote-counting is to make sure it's an accurate and secure tally, not to end the suspense moments after polls close.

“There's nothing nefarious about it,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The time delay is to protect the integrity of the process.”

Trump's demand also doesn't seem to account for the six time zones from the East Coast to Hawaii.

David Becker, an elections expert and co-author of “The Big Truth,” debunking Trump’s 2020 election lies, said it’s not realistic for election officials in thousands of jurisdictions to “instantly snap their fingers and count 160 million multi-page ballots with dozens of races on them.”

During a Sunday rally in Pennsylvania, Trump demanded that the race be decided soon after some polls begin closing.

“They have to be decided by 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock on Tuesday night," Trump said. "Bunch of crooked people. These are crooked people.”

It was not clear who he was targeting with the “crooked people” remark.

Timing is one example of why Trump's demands don't match the reality of conducting elections in the U.S. By 11 p.m. Eastern time, polls will just be closing in the two Western swing states of Arizona and Nevada.

Trump has led conservatives to bemoan that the U.S. doesn't count elections as swiftly as France or Argentina, where results for recent races have been announced within hours of polls closing. But that's because those countries tabulate only a single election at a time. The decentralized U.S. system prevents the federal government from controlling elections.

Instead, votes are counted in nearly 10,000 separate jurisdictions, each of which has its own races for the state legislature, city council, school boards and ballot measures to tabulate at the same time. That's why it takes longer for the U.S. to count votes.

The Associated Press calls races when there is no possibility that the trailing candidate can make up the gap. Sometimes, if one candidate is significantly behind, a winner can be called quickly. But if the margin is narrow, then every last vote could matter. It takes a while before every vote is counted even in the most efficient jurisdictions in the country.

In 2018, for example, Republican Rick Scott won the U.S. Senate race in Florida, a state conservatives regularly praise for its quick tally. But the AP didn't call Scott's victory until after the conclusion of a recount on Nov. 20 because Scott's margin was so slim.

It also takes time to count every one of the millions of votes because election officials have to process disputed, or “provisional,” ballots, and to see if they were legitimately cast. Overseas ballots from military members or other U.S. citizens abroad can trickle in at the last minute. Mail ballots usually land early, but there's a lengthy process to make sure they're not cast fraudulently. If that process doesn't start before Election Day, it can back up the count.

Some states, such as Arizona, also give voters whose mail ballots were rejected because the signatures didn't match up to five days to prove they actually cast the ballot. That means final numbers simply cannot be available Tuesday night.

Some of the sluggishness is due to state-specific election rules. In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, two of the most important swing states, election officials for years have pleaded with Republican lawmakers to change the law that prevents them from processing their mail ballots before Election Day. That means mail ballots get tallied late, and frequently the results don't start to get reported until after Election Day.

Democrats have traditionally dominated mail voting, which has made it seem like Republicans are in the lead until the early hours of the next morning, when Democratic mail votes finally get added to the tally. Experts even have names for this from past elections — the “red mirage” or the “blue shift.” Trump exploited that dynamic in 2020 when he had his supporters demand an abrupt end to vote counts — the ballots that remained untallied were largely mail ones that were for Joe Biden. It's not clear how that will play out this year, since Republicans have shifted and voted in big numbers during early voting.

Michigan used to have similar restrictions, but after Democrats won control of the state Legislature in 2022 they removed the prohibition on early processing of mail ballots. That state's Democratic Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson, said she hopes to have most results available by Wednesday.

“At the end of the day, chief election officials are the folks who have the ability to provide those accurate results. Americans should focus on what they say and not what any specific candidate or folks who are part of the campaign say,” said Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Some of Trump's allies say he should be even more aggressive about declaring victory this time around.

Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon, who in 2020 predicted the then-president would declare victory before the race was called, advocated for a similar strategy during a recent press conference after he was released from federal prison, where he was serving time for a contempt of Congress conviction related to the investigation into Trump's effort to overturn his loss in 2020.

“President Trump came up at 2:30 in the morning and talked," Bannon said. "He should have done it at 11 o'clock in 2020.”

Other Trump supporters have taken a darker tone. His former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, suggested during a recent interview on the right-wing American Truth Project podcast that violence could erupt in states still counting ballots the day after Election Day because people “are just not going to put up with it.”

Trying to project a sense of inevitability about a Trump win, the former president and his supporters have been touting early vote data and favorable polls to contend the election is all but over. Republicans have returned to voting early after largely staying away at Trump's direction in 2020 and 2022. In some swing states that track party registration, registered Republicans are outvoting Democrats in early voting.

But that doesn't mean Republicans are ahead in any meaningful sense. Early voting data does not tell you who will win an election because it only records who voted, not how they voted.

Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign has been explicitly targeting Republicans disillusioned by Trump. In each of those states where more Republicans have voted, there also are huge numbers of voters casting early ballots who are not registered with either of the two major political parties. If Harris won just a tiny fraction more of those votes than Trump, it would erase the small leads Republicans have.

There's only one way to find out who won the presidential election: Wait until enough votes are tallied, whenever that is.

FILE - An election official sorts mail ballots at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center in Phoenix, March 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Serkan Gurbuz, File)

Washoe County election workers sort ballots at the Registrar of Voters Office in Reno, Nev., Tuesday, Oct. 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Tom R. Smedes)

FILE - Allegheny County Election Division Deputy Manager Chet Harhut carries a container of mail-in ballots from a secure area at the elections warehouse in Pittsburgh, April 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)

Trump wants the presidential winner to be declared on election night. That's highly unlikely

Trump wants the presidential winner to be declared on election night. That's highly unlikely

FILE - An election worker examines a ballot at the Clackamas County Elections office, May 19, 2022, in Oregon City, Ore. Problems with a ballot-sorting machine are delaying the vote count in a suburban Portland, Oregon county where issues with blurry bar codes on mail-in ballots delayed elections results in a key Congressional primary race for two weeks in 2022. (AP Photo/Gillian Flaccus, File)