Asian shares slide and US futures and dollar drop after Moody’s downgrade of US credit rating

HONG KONG (AP) — Asian shares fell Monday and U.S. futures and the dollar weakened after Moody’s Ratings downgraded the sovereign credit rating for the United States because of its failure to stem a rising tide of debt.

The future for the S&P 500 lost 1% while that for the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.7%. The U.S. dollar slipped to 145.04 Japanese yen from 145.65 yen. The euro advanced to $1.1211 from $1.1183.

The yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury was at about 4.52%, up from 4.44% late Friday.

Chinese markets fell after the government said retail sales rose 5.1% in April from a year earlier, less than expected. Growth in industrial output slowed to 6.1% year-on-year from 7.7% in March.

That could mean rising inventories if production outpaces demand even more than it already does. But it also may reflect some of the shipping boom before some of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods took effect.

“After an improvement in March, China’s economy looks to have slowed again last month, with firms and households turning more cautious due to the trade war,” Julian Evans-Pritchard of Capital Economics said in a report.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng lost 0.2% to 23,310.75 and the Shanghai Composite Index was nearly unchanged at 3,368.00.

Alibaba shares in Hong Kong skidded 2.8% following a report that U.S. officials are scrutinizing a potential Apple-Alibaba deal to integrate AI features into iPhones in China.

Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 gave up 0.7% to 37,498.63 while the Kospi in Seoul dropped 0.9% to 2,603.43.

Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 declined 0.6% to 8,295.10.

Taiwan’s Taiex was 1.5% lower.

In oil trading early Monday, U.S. benchmark crude oil lost 54 cents to $61.43 per barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, gave up 55 cents to $64.86 per barrel.

Wall Street cruised to a strong finish last week as U.S. stocks glided closer to the all-time high they set just a few months earlier, though it may feel like an economic era ago.

The S&P 500 rose 0.7%. It has rallied to within 3% of its record set in February after it briefly dropped roughly 20% below it last month.

Gains have been driven by hopes that Trump will lower his tariffs against other countries after reaching trade deals with them.

The Dow industrials added 0.8% and the Nasdaq composite climbed 0.5%.

Trump’s trade war sent financial markets reeling because they could slow the economy and drive it into a recession, while also pushing inflation higher.

This week featured some encouraging news on each of those fronts. The United States and China announced a 90-day stand-down in most of their punishing tariffs against each other, while a couple of reports on inflation in the United States came in better than economists expected.

That uncertainty has been hitting U.S. households and businesses, raising worries that they may freeze their spending and long-term plans. The latest reading in a survey of U.S. consumers by the University of Michigan showed sentiment soured again in May, though the pace of decline wasn’t as bad as in prior months.

Perhaps more worryingly, expectations for coming inflation keep building, and U.S. consumers are now bracing for 7.3% in the next 12 months, according to the University of Michigan’s preliminary survey results. That’s up from a forecast of 6.5% a month before.

Charter Communications rose 1.8% after it said Friday that it has agreed to merge with Cox Communications in a deal that would combine two of the country’s largest cable companies.

CoreWeave jumped 22.1% after Nvidia disclosed that it had increased its ownership stake in the company to 7%, whose cloud platform helps customers running artificial-intelligence workloads.

Novo Nordisk’s stock that trades in the United States fell 2.7% after the Danish company behind the Wegovy drug for weight loss said that Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen will step down as CEO and that the board is looking for his successor.

Hope remains that this week’s better-than-expected signals on inflation could give the Federal Reserve more leeway to cut interest rates later this year if high tariffs drag down the U.S. economy.