Asian shares mostly lower, extending Wall Street losses

Shares were mostly lower in Asia on Monday after Wall Street logged its worst week since the pandemic began in 2020.

Benchmarks declined in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Seoul and Sydney but rose in Shanghai. U.S. futures were higher.

Investors have been growing increasingly worried about how aggressively the Federal Reserve, which holds a policy meeting this week, might act to cool rising inflation.

Historically low rates, dubbed quantitative easing, or QE, have helped support the broader market as the economy absorbed a sharp hit from the pandemic in 2020 and then recovered over the last two years.

Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 index edged 0.1% lower to 27,494.40 while the Hang Seng in Hong Kong shed 0.9% to 24,735.70. In Australia, the S&P/ASX 200 lost 0.5% to 7,142.10 and India’s Sensex dropped 0.9% to 58,482.15.

South Korea’s Kospi dropped 1.4% to 2,794.26 on heavy selling of big technology companies like Samsung and SK Hynix.

The Shanghai Composite index gained 0.2% to 3,529.63.

On Friday, the benchmark S&P 500 sank 1.9% to 4,397.94, falling 5.7% for the week in its worst weekly loss since March 2020.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index dipped 2.7% to 13,768.92. It has fallen for four straight weeks and is now more than 10% below its most recent high, putting it in what Wall Street considers a market correction.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1.3% to 34,265.37.

Peloton rose 11.7% after the maker of exercise bikes and treadmills said fiscal second-quarter revenue would meet previous estimates. The stock tanked a day earlier after CNBC reported Peloton was temporarily halting production of exercise equipment to stem a decline in sales.