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South Korea, Australia open lower
Staff and wires
SYDNEY, Australia -- Markets in South Korea, Australia and New Zealand are all lower in early trade Monday, with Seoul's Kospi off a sharp 2.7 percent. Japan's financial markets are closed Monday for the autumn equinox public holiday. Singapore and Taiwan have also opened in the red. Korea's falls are broad-based, with market heavyweight Samsung Electronics off 2.4 percent to 327,000 won and investor favorite SK Telecom down by a similar amount to 226,500 won. Big steelmaker Posco is one of the heaviest losers, down 3.4 percent to 114,000 won. In Australia, the benchmark S&P/ASX 200 index has lost 13.2 points or 0.44 percent to 3060.0 on concerns about the U.K. capital position of the country's largest life insurer and fund management, AMP. New low for AMPAMP emerged from Friday's trading halt to dip another 3 percent Monday to a fresh low, off 34 cents to A$11.50. At one point in the morning it touched A$11.25 Media group News Corp, telco Telstra and resources major BHP Billiton have also lost ground.
Late on Friday AMP told the Australian Stock Exchange that it needed to make another 500 million pounds ($830 million) available to support its Pearl fund in the U.K. That is on top of a A$1 billion ($550 million) injection earlier this year. News Corp is down 2.13 percent to A$9.21, BHP Billiton is down 0.76 percent to A$9.09 and Telstra has fallen 0.4 percent to A$4.73. An unconfirmed report in the Australian Financial Review says the federal government is considering selling all of its 50.1 percent holding in Telstra in one hit next year, instead of the expected three-stage selloff between 2003 and 2005. New Zealand's Top 40 is down 0.6 percent, Singapore's Straits Times is off by a similar percentage to 1412.22 and Taiwan is down 0.4 percent to 4409. Fed meets TuesdayGlobally, financial markets are expected to tread water ahead of the U.S. Federal Reserve rate-setting meeting on Tuesday. The Fed's risk assessment is likely to tilt further towards economic weakness, although the key fed funds rate is widely expected to be left at 1.75 percent. On Wall Street, the key indices closed in positive territory on Friday but logged their fourth negative week in a row after profit warnings from Electronic Data Systems, financial giant J.P. Morgan Chase and others. For the week, the Dow slipped 3.9 percent and the Nasdaq lost 5.5 percent. Reuters contributed to this report.
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