US election triggers Asian market turmoil

Traders, investors and analysts rode whipsawing markets Wednesday, as US presidential election results – in a surprise reversal – showed increasing support for a victory by Republican Donald Trump. Japanese and Korean investors pushed their stocks higher, in expectation of a win for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton with encouragement from early polls. By mid afternoon in Tokyo, with voting increasingly favoring Mr. Trump, stock indexes were plunging and the yen – which, like gold, is seen as a safe place to stash money in times of turmoil – was spiking, prompting Japan’s central bank, banking and finance ministries to call an emergency meeting. Chinese equity investors were holding their breath as they watched the Shanghai Composite Index head south, after Mr. Trump’s odds of winning the election rose. “It might still be too early to call the result, but clearly we are being dragged down by foreign markets that dread the prospects of a Trump presidency,” Zhang Gang, senior analyst at Central China Securities, told The Wall Street Journal.